Posted by Tumblr is a microblogging & social media website created by David Karp in 2007. It’s a place where people can post multimedia content with the option to make their blogs private or public. Many fandoms, creators, and communities in general on the Internet called this site home, with its prime demographic being young adults. But because the site hosted users from all sorts of communities with a range of ideologies and identities, Tumblr has not been without controversy. One example of an issue that was prevalent on the site was the glorification of self-harm and eating disorder from communities that labelled themselves “pro-ana” aka pro anorexia. Tumblr was forced to ban these blogs in 2012 due to their growing relevancy on the site and issued a PSA page that included resources such as links to the National Suicide Lifeline to be brought up every time anyone searched terms like “depression” or “suicide”. This is one of many controversies that the site has had over the years, but the one that has had debatably the largest impact on the site, and subsequently other sites as well, has to be the NSFW ban of 2018.
The Internet would not be what it is today if not for pornography. The prospect of anonymity that the free Internet cultures is one that allows for people to express parts of themselves that would certainly not bode well if shown in public. Tumblr was one of the major hubs that fostered this free spirit outlook of the Internet. Many very specific kink and fetish communities that many would have NEVER thought existed found solitude on the site. In fact, for plenty of users, porn was the only reason they logged on to Tumblr. But when Yahoo bought Tumblr in 2013, the site began implementing more and more restrictions on NSFW (not safe for work) content. One early restriction was a requirement that all explicit content have the tag “nsfw” in order for it to be caught by a “sensitive” filter that users can opt out of if they choose. It also required for people to sign up and give their age before being able to opt out of this filter. While this wasn’t a very sound method, as many underage people could simply lie about their age, it was still recognized to be somewhat helpful. However, many thought these restrictions were not enough. In 2016 and more officially in 2018, Tumblr was banned in Indonesia because of its reputation for hosting pornographic content. This country wide ban was due to very strict anti-pornography laws being implemented by leading Islamic political parties in Indonesia. Many other foreign countries like China joined in on banning Tumblr for its citizens, but the USA also began to put the American site and many others like it in hot water when the SESTA/FOSTA was passed by Congress in March 2018. The SESTA/FOSTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers/Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) was meant to crack down on sex traffickers who used the Internet to lure victims in, but the bill was so broadly worded that it only served to hold platform owners accountable for sex trafficking that they may not have even known happened on their sites, and restrict the speech of the online users. There was no research done that showed these restrictions would help prevent or catch sex offenders using the Internet. A bill with good intentions, but awful execution. Elliot Harmon in their article called “How Congress Censored the Internet” published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation the day the bill was passed had this prediction:
“It’s easy to see the impact that this ramp-up in liability will have on online speech: facing the risk of ruinous litigation, online platforms will have little choice but to become much more restrictive in what sorts of discussion—and what sorts of users—they allow, censoring innocent people in the process.”
In November 2018, Tumblr was abruptly removed from the Apple IOS store without any warning to users. It was then released that child pornography had been found on the site, starkly going against Apple’s guidelines that demanded every app have a content filter to screen for such explicit material. Tumblr claimed that all its images are filtered and scanned against a database to prevent explicit images of children to be shown on the site, but somehow some images were not represented in the database, thus managed to slip through. By December 2018, Tumblr officially removed all NSFW content from the site. In 2019, Tumblr was bought by Automattic Inc., who notably owns WordPress, and the CEO Matt Mullenweg announced that he had no intention of releasing the NSFW ban anytime soon.
Remember how I said a lot of different communities call Tumblr home? While this diversity can and certainly is a good thing in most cases, it is not in the case of one certain community that call themselves MAP or “Minor Attracted Persons”. Many people on Tumblr were not surprised by the finding of child pornography on the site because this community, who very controversially consider themselves a subset of the LGBTQ+ community, had been allowed a space to interact on the site due to free online speech. So, many former users of Tumblr do not disagree with the NSFW ban.
”I used it for awhile back a few years ago and have to be honest I was put off by the amount of scary rape porn and stuff on there that would get into my feed no matter how much I tried to curate it. It was that Wild West mentality I think that started the panic about NSFW on Tumblr, and then outright child porn on there was the last straw.
I agree with the artistic nudity and such, heck I am a contemporary artist by day, that’s kinda to be expected. But all the creepy borderline illegal (and outright illegal stuff) needed to go away. Problem was it might have gone too far.”
user Chaosforged in the comment section of the article “Tumblr sold off yet again, adult content bans to remain in place” by Petrana Radulovic for Polygon
But like Elliot Harmon foreshadowed with the passing of SESTA/FOSTA, this ban also ended up harming a lot of innocent people. While all pornography was swept up in the ban, it also subsequently banned any female presenting nipples to be shown on the site, which restricted educating blogs about medical events like mastectomy and gender reassignment surgery. It also restricted sex education blogs, which really supported the LGBTQ+ community as a backbone for many youth who had no other way to learn how to have safe sex. This ban also majorly impacted both NSFW and SFW artists too because not all depictions of nudity in art are meant to be sexual. In fact, most figure drawing classes have artists draw nude forms in order to learn anatomy, so all the blogs that might have been useful references of study were shut down as well. A lot of people who found refuge in completely legal kink and fetish communities on Tumblr became displaced after the ban. I think one former user of Tumblr in the same comment section as the quote above summed up the situation perfectly:
“It’s not the porn they need to bring back. Like, it’s easily the most replaceable part, everyone keeps going on and on about the porn but you can get better replacements on any porn site. There are so many porn bots still too, and as we’ve seen with so many tumblr clones who try to “bring back the porn”… it’s not what people actually want and WHY we loved using it.
The NSFW content there was original, it was created by artists, or photographed by people who genuinely wanted to express their freedom. It was a place for niche groups to come together collectively and talk/show/help each other in a safe environment without being judged for their kinks. Where you could literally enter in a tag and just discover a world of people you can get to know and form a community super easily. You can’t bring that back just by saying “ok, NSFW is unbanned come back pls”… that trust isn’t built back up instantly.
There needs to be a huge undertaking to really rebrand and really convince people that tumblr is the safe space for those who need it respectfully.”
user MoonbucksTeas in the comment section of the article “Tumblr sold off yet again, adult content bans to remain in place” by Petrana Radulovic for Polygon
Since the ban, Tumblr has gone from having roughly 400 million users to under 300 million today. Many of those displaced users consisted of people who mainly used Tumblr for porn, but a good amount of them were also visual artists and photographers who had fans that supported them on the platform. A site that received a lot of users from the Tumblr diaspora was Twitter, one of the few major social media sites left that still allows for NSFW content to be displayed. Although Twitter now seems to be the hub for most NSFW artists and people simply looking for quick porn, it can’t replicate the tight-nit community experience that Tumblr harbored for so many years. So, as many people on the Internet said ironically and unironically after the NSFW ban of 2018, “RIP Tumblr”.