NUDITY is restricted on a number of social media platforms, including Instagram and Twitter.
Tumblr, however, has taken steps toward ‘a more open’ community by officially updating its nudity guidelines in November 2022.
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What are the Tumblr Community Guidelines for nudity?
As of November 1, 2022, nudity is acceptable on Tumblr – with some exceptions.
“Today, we’re taking the next step: We now welcome a broader range of expression, creativity, and art on Tumblr, including content depicting the human form (yes, that includes the naked human form),” the social media company wrote in a statement on Tuesday.
Nudity, mature subject matters, and sexual themes will be allowed on the platform as long as users share them using the appropriate Community Labels.
The guidelines, however, specifically rule out the sharing of visual depictions of sexually explicit acts.
Content like porn remains off-limits on Tumblr and is urged to be reported for safety purposes, as well as to “successfully support porn communities at this time.”
Hate speech, spam, violent threats, or any illegal acts/content are also not allowed.
In order to post or view content within the following four categories – mature, drug and alcohol addiction, violence, and sexual themes – Tumblr users must properly select the community label their content belongs to.
“Broadly speaking, our goal is to give you more control over the type of content you’d like to see (or not see!) on Tumblr,” the company wrote in a statement.
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“Tumblr is whatever you want it to be, after all. Community labels gives a post creator more control over who can see their post (only those who want to see it, or only those over eighteen, for example).
“On the post consumption side, community labels allow anyone on Tumblr to omit categories of posts from their dashboard completely if they so choose. They can also blur the posts, or choose to have them show up like normal.”
They added: “We want to encourage creativity, self-expression, and exploration, but we also want to make sure that folks can avoid content they’d rather not see.”
When did Tumblr ban adult content?
Tumblr was noted for its sizeable amount of pornographic content, with a reported 16.45 percent of blogs exclusively containing pornographic material.
On December 17, 2018, Tumblr banned adult content – including pictures, GIFs, illustrations, and videos that “depicts sex acts.”
After this, all content that Tumblr’s sensors flagged as violating their policies was set to private and could then only be seen by the blog’s creator.
The news generated shock and anger among users as, up until then, porn had been allowed on Tumblr since its founding in 2007.
It impacted a large proportion of its user community who used the platform to share erotic and NSFW imagery including everything from fanart to sex education.
The ban particularly affected those representing LGBT communities who felt underrepresented by mainstream sites and used it as a safe haven to share creative work with adult themes.
Within a year of the “porn ban,” traffic to Tumblr and app downloads dropped drastically.
According to TechCrunch, the platform’s “web traffic has dropped by around 30% and has largely stagnated.”
In 2019, Tumblr was bought by the WordPress owner, Automattic, for less than $3million, compared with its once-$1.1 billion price tag, as per CNBC.
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What caused Tumblr to ban adult content?
It seemed very likely that Apple forced Tumblr to make the move.
In November 2018, Apple removed the blogging platform from its app store over child pornography issues.
Apple’s iOS guidelines state that all apps must have a content filter to screen out such material.
In a statement, Tumblr said that while every image uploaded to the platform is “scanned against an industry database of child sexual abuse material” to filter out explicit images, a “routine audit” discovered content that was absent from the database, allowing it to slip through the filter.
This led to a sitewide crackdown on pornography and eventually the banning of adult content.
What is Tumblr?
Tumblr is a blogging and social media tool founded by David Karpthat in 2007.
The platform follows a free-form nature and allows users to publish a “tumblelog” – or short blog posts – while being given the creative ability to heavily customize their own pages.
Tumblr is one of few social media networks to have design flexibility, unlike Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, which all have standard profile pages that cannot be altered by users.
