Tumblr Moves To Ban All 'Adult Content' After App Store Crackdown
STEALING BONES IS STILL OK
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When Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1 billion — a risky move that, by most accounts, has gone quite poorly — users feared that the blogging platform's new parent company would quickly move to wipe out all the porn. Then-CEO Marissa Mayer quickly moved to quell those concerns, and sexually explicit content has indeed thrived on Tumblr since the acquisition, even after it was initially made harder to find in 2013, then easier again last year. Today, the axe has finally fallen: After being delisted from the Apple App Store last month over ineffective child pornography filtering, Tumblr announced that a blanket ban on "explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions)" will go into effect on December 17, which happens to be the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.

In a post announcing the policy change on the Tumblr Staff page, CEO Jeff D'Onofrio (formerly Tumblr's President and COO, promoted to CEO after founder David Karp's exit in 2017) does not shy from mentioning the issue of child pornography, but only to insist that the new restrictions on adult content aren't a response to the proliferation of unlawful content:

Let's first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today's policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We've always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

There's no doubting that Tumblr wants the platform to be free of child pornography, but considering the timing it's hard not to see this policy change either as Tumblr throwing in the towel on filtering out unlawful explicit content (not a simple battle to fight by any means) by resorting to broader algorithmic and human moderation methods to cull all explicit content, or as Tumblr leveraging its child pornography crisis to ban other explicit content for reasons it would rather not commit to publicly for branding reasons.

Tumblr's had a reputation as a haven for porn for quite some time: In 2016, researchers with access to anonymized data on 130 million users found that 22 percent of Tumblr users followed accounts posting pornographic content, while less than one percent of users were producing said content. However small the percentage of users producing explicit content is today, you can still be sure pornography is a massive activity driver for Tumblr across all kinds of accounts, ranging from porn curation blogs to pages run by sex workers to support their own livelihoods — whether that involves creating pornography, working as an escort, camming or some combination of activities.

Earlier this year, after the passage of the "Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act" and "Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act" (FOSTA/SESTA) bills, sex workers felt the immediate chilling effects of the bills' included exception that allows web platforms to be held responsible for hosting advertisements for unlawful sex work. In short order, classified ad site Backpage.com was seized by the US government, Craigslist eliminated its "Personals" section and Reddit banned several sex work-related subreddits, with other platforms tweaking their terms of service and strengthening existing enforcement measures. Even Switter, a sex worker-run Mastodon instance quickly launched in response to FOSTA/SESTA, was deplatformed by Cloudflare within a month of its creation.

In the case of Tumblr, many sex workers have long turned to the blogging platform not only as a place to reach clients, but for intra-community support on every sex work issue under the sun, from abusive clients to how to file their taxes. Not only will sex workers who operate within the law — say, producing and distributing pornography in accordance with applicable laws and platform policies — be effectively denied yet another platform for reaching their audience, but communities of sex workers, especially further marginalized and struggling workers, will be discouraged from sticking around on the platform as a site for each other's support by way of Tumblr removing any explicit content they've posted, assuming their accounts aren't banned for it outright.

D'Onofrio pays lip service to Tumblr's history of permissiveness regarding sexual content in his post ("We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey"), but the newly-posted Help Center guidelines are especially telling of the struggle to come. How can the platform expect to promote "sex positivity" with a policy that bans "exposed female-presenting nipples" — an amazingly tortured attempt to reconcile a prudish Instagram sensibility with progressive, LGBTQ+ inclusive language — except "in connection with breastfeeding, birth or after-birth moments, and health-related situations, such as post-mastectomy or gender confirmation surgery"? The Help Center note also says written erotica, "nudity related to political or newsworthy speech" and nudity depicted in art all remain safe to post… which, of course, is no guarantee that any now-permissible adult content won't be accidentally or purposefully flagged as "explicit," requiring the user to appeal to Tumblr if they want the content reinstated.

Perhaps the most worrying element of Tumblr's adult content Help Center post is its opening paragraph, which emphasizes the ease of reporting content for violations:

Starting Dec 17, adult content will not be allowed on Tumblr, regardless of how old you are. You can read more about what kinds of content are not allowed on Tumblr in our Community Guidelines. If you spot a post that you don't think belongs on Tumblr, period, you can report it: From the dashboard or in search results, tap or click the share menu (paper airplane) at the bottom of the post, and hit "Report."

Use of reporting tools to harass sex workers on internet platforms is nothing new, but as platforms have taken steps to blacklist groups that promote hate speech and violence, internet trolls have have responded by exploiting easy reporting and vague policy language to target anyone and everyone they're ideologically opposed to, including sex workers. Last week, Paris Martineau reported on the "ThotAudit," a barely weeks-old harassment campaign seeking to ban sex workers from payment platforms like PayPal and Cash App, for Wired — she lays out the heart of the matter quite succinctly:

Organizers of the campaign against sex workers are trying to capitalize on the increased vigilance of social media companies and payment providers in policing their platforms. Historically, those networks censored individual posts or banned individual accounts sparingly, not wanting to be seen as regulating speech. More recently, though, partly in response to concerns that they are inciting violence or encouraging hate speech, networks such as Facebook and Twitter are acting more aggressively.

[Wired]

Assuming Tumblr's policy change is accompanied by an actual increase in enforcement, this will put Tumblr far closer to Facebook and Twitter in terms of being an unsafe space for sex workers, leaving few remaining spaces (be they protected, or precarious gray areas) left for adult content and for what passes as "acceptable" discussion of sex work, by sex workers. In 2018, Tumblr shouldn't be given a pass for any harassment and abuse that follows from defining adult content so broadly and encouraging policing amongst its users. It's not theoretical — the use of policies supposedly intended to combat sexual exploitation online against those who engage in consensual sex work and, for that matter, against anyone who may falsely be identified as a sex worker, is already widespread.

The conclusion? Tumblr knows about the potential for misuse, and has deemed that it's better to deal with or brush off the coming consequences than to attempt to find a better solution. Ultimately, Tumblr has deemed that it's better to have no porn at all than to try sorting out what is and isn't OK, or as D'Onofrio so brusquely puts it in the policy announcement:

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

Today, you don't need to look far on Twitter or Reddit to find people declaring that the new adult content policy will be the death of Tumblr. Whether the people in charge like it or not, many people specializing in "adult content" have chosen to build a following on Tumblr, and an undoubtedly much larger number of users have flocked to the platform to see that content, at least in part. Whatever the responsibility platforms have to combat sexual exploitation is, in the moral or legalistic sense, when the action they take is not only poised to negatively impact the lives of popular content creators (forgive the term) but is also likely to increase the potential for harassment, it's hard to see how those actions will help create "the most welcoming environment possible for our community." You don't have to flippantly characterize Tumblr as only having value as a place for porn — you just have to acknowledge that an environment with decreased resources and increased hostility is no place for a community to thrive.

Update: The original version of this post cited December 3 as the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers — it is actually December 17, the day Tumblr's new policy goes into effect. The author apologizes for the error.

<p>Mathew Olson is an Associate Editor at Digg.</p>

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