Tumblr made what could be charitably described as “a lot” of mistakes in the roll out of the ban. The only semi-helpful result of this high-profile disaster in platform censorship is how well-publicized its failings have been. There’s a human cost to what Tumblr probably just sees as a business decision. About how all of this is reflective of a very specific, sanitizing view of what’s acceptable online. About how hard it is to find somewhere to go that would be as safe as Tumblr had been. About the queer and sex-postive communities that felt threatened and erased. While Tumblr has never come right out and said what caused their decision, it’s a fair bet that some combination of these factors got them there.Īnd there’s a lot to say about the effect of this ban. And it’s much easier to do that by using a filtering tool that is over-inclusive-so much so that it winds up flagging your own examples of acceptable content. So, when you’re being cut off from potential customers and you could be liable for things related to sex, it’s much easier to just institute a blanket ban on sex and nudity as much as possible. Add to that passage of SESTA/FOSTA, a bill which makes platforms liable for what is said and done by their users if those things are tied to prostitution.Ĭompanies-especially large ones-are risk-averse. The existence of porn on Tumblr also led to it being banned in Indonesia. The ban came a month after Tumblr saw its app disappear from the Apple App Store, which, as a gatekeeper, has enforced draconian rules for app developers, exerting control over how its users get to experience the Internet. In December of 2018, blogging platform Tumblr announced a new ban on “adult content,” a wonderfully vague term that wasn’t so much defined in later posts as made more confusing. And so Tumblr is also a perfect microcosm of the problems plaguing people on every platform. It’s also the story of how people at the margins find themselves pushed out of the places where they had built communities.
Tumblr’s ban on “adult content” is a treasure trove of problems: filtering technology that doesn’t work, a law that forces companies to make decisions that make others unsafe, and the problems that arise when one company has outsized influence on speech.
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