Tumblr to ban all pornographic content

[Opendium_Steve]

Remains to be seen how well they can police this, but...

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46434711

[pete]

Business throws away main source of revenue*, news at 11.

 

*ok, cat pictures as well.

[FishCustard]

Surely there are plenty of places on the Internet for porn (

), but yes, if a large part of their revenue came from it then it does seem a little drastic.

[Bompalompalomp]

Surely there are plenty of places on the Internet for porn (

), but yes, if a large part of their revenue came from it then it does seem a little drastic.

It comes from their sheer incompetency at actually moderating the site. I stopped using it years ago but my girlfriends still does for her business and fandoms. People have been reporting CP from abusers and teenagers creating their own pornographic content heavily and Tumblr has done next to nothing about it. People have done group campaigns of reporting child abuse content and Tumblr still hasn't removed them.

 

It's so bad there that users have been saying that child abuse blogs are being recommended to them sometimes when following normal adult content. Their incompetence at removing child abuse content got their apps removed from the app stores and they've basically given up on moderating it at all.

 

Now the problem is that everything being flagged as NSFW to be removed... just isn't all NSFW. Art is being flagged for removal, even perfectly SFW pictures that have nothing to do with it. So people are going to lose their SFW content and a mass exodus will be happening.

[synaesthesia]

They'll just be in line with the rest like imgur. Blocked regardless here

[DJ-1701]

I wonder if a certain well known website will now be offering blogging.

[Opendium_Steve]

Well, the latest thing was Tumblr being dropped from the Apple app store after Apple found that CP was available through the app. That seems to have brought things to a head and caused a (kneejerk?) reaction to ban all porn.

 

But they've been under pressure to tackle their porn problem for quite a while, because they have porn and non-porn all mixed together with no way to separate them, all on a platform that's used by a lot of kids. They started off by introducing "community tagging" of porn a few years ago, which was about as reliable as you would expect.

 

For what its worth, nothing on Tumblr seems to have appeared on the IWF block list in the past couple of years, so I presume they are at least responsive at taking down CP when the IWF get involved.

 

Its been suggested to me that maybe they are gearing up to sell the platform off and want to clean it up to make it more saleable (but that's just speculation).

 

Now the problem is that everything being flagged as NSFW to be removed... just isn't all NSFW. Art is being flagged for removal, even perfectly SFW pictures that have nothing to do with it. So people are going to lose their SFW content and a mass exodus will be happening.

 

I seem to recall that Tumblr has both "porn" and "nsfw" tags. I'm not clear on the distinction between them though, and I suspect no one else is either. As anyone involved in porn filtering knows, trying to figure out where the line is between "porn" and "art" is an impossible task, not least because that line is in different places for different people!

 

But yes, if you launch a platform that makes no distinction between porn and non-porn, trying to separate them at a later date is always going to be a nightmare.