She said if Tumblr allows users to post nudity, mature subject matter, and content with sexual themes, it should acknowledge that in filtering other adult content, mistakes will be made. Trendacosta told Ars that Tumblr missed an opportunity to provide clear paths for how community members can respond to its new content guidelines. “They had pretty severe failures before”-when the rule was to ban any nudity that wasn’t considered classical art-“and I think they're gonna get even more failure now.” “The problem is that when you introduce any sort of complexity into your rules, and you're relying on an automated tool, you're actually going to get even more failure,” Trendacosta told Ars. “The change is actually welcomed, but the over-reliance on technical filtering to do the heavy lifting on a policy like that is not great.”Īlthough Tumblr's step intends to diminish censorship, Trendacosta said there’s a chance that by taking away the blanket ban, Tumblr could risk censoring more users. “It is incredibly difficult for machines to learn context,” Trendacosta told Ars. In its announcement, Tumblr specified that “visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits on Tumblr.” Advertisement It's not clear yet if Tumblr will be any better at filtering newly permitted nudity and mature content from the adult content it still bans, but EFF’s associate director of policy and activism, Katharine Trendacosta, told Ars that Tumblr users should expect some undue censorship so long as Tumblr’s relying on computers to filter out what’s unacceptable. At that time, Tumblr’s filtering tool seemed incapable of judging which content didn’t violate its ban, with a hashtag mocking Tumblr's efforts that emerged, #TooSexyForTumblr, showing a wide range of wrongly restricted images, including heart-shaped necklaces, a hanger, a flamingo floaty, socks featuring Troll dolls, and a Louis Vuitton bag. In 2018, the Electronic Frontier Foundation documented how Tumblr struggled with automated content removal of posts that did not violate its adult content ban. Banning the content caused mass protests, including top creators, who then also complained that Tumblr's content filtering was incorrectly targeting and deleting their posts. Forbes reported that, although fewer than 1 percent of its user base produced adult content, consumers of that content comprised a quarter of Tumblr's users. Tumblr decided it couldn't afford to be dropped by Apple and issued a blanket ban on adult content. When Tumblr banned adult content in 2018, it was partly because problems with child sexual abuse materials led Apple to ban the app from its store. The next step, Tumblr said, was welcoming “a broader range of expression, creativity, and art on Tumblr, including content depicting the human form (yes, that includes the naked human form).” AdvertisementĪccording to Tumblr, users can now label content as “mature” or having “sexual themes,” and users who do not wish to see that type of content can adjust their feed.

These labels allow users to set preferences to restrict specific content from their feeds. Tumblr users got a hint this change was coming when Tumblr introduced community labels in September. And other tweets reacting to Tumblr’s announcement received just as many likes simply out of enthusiasm for the return of nudity on Tumblr, seemingly indicating that some of the users who fled Tumblr when it banned adult content in 2018 would be willing to come back. However, it appears Tumblr’s decision could lure Twitter users away.Įarlier this year, The New Yorker reported that Tumblr was already attracting a younger demographic that other social platforms like Facebook and Twitter want to attract. Tweets garnering tens of thousands of likes may be joking when they call Tumblr’s recent announcement-confirming that it would no longer restrict content featuring “nudity, mature subject matter, or sexual themes”-a “death blow” to Twitter, which many users are already threatening to abandon.

At a time when Elon Musk has just begun fiddling with Twitter’s knobs in attempts to make it more money, the possibility that Tumblr could rise back up as a profitable social media giant simply by allowing some users to post nude pics again is a prospect that has left many Twitter users nakedly giddy.

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