Tumblr Is Banning Porn, So I Guess Tumblr Is Dead Now - Tumblr Banning Porn December 17
Apple Sucked Tumblr Into Its Walled Garden, Where Sex Is Bad - Motherboard
This year has been a bad year for adult free expression on the web. It started in April with the passage of the FOSTA-SESTA law, which is another nannying law that restricts the rights of adults in the name of "the children" and "victims of sex trafficking". This resulted in a number of sites with adult content either shuttering or shutting down the 18+ parts of their site, one of the most notable being Craigslist shutting down it's entire personals section in the US for fear of running afoul of this vague and wide-reaching law.
Craigslist Just Nuked Its Personal Ads Section Because of a Sex-Trafficking Bill
Now we hear today that Tumblr, one of the last major social media sites to allow adult content, will ban and purge such content starting December 17th. This due to a child porn panic, which led to the relatively puritanical Apple removing the Tumblr app from its App Store last last month.
This new policy will not only target hardcore porn but also photos and video depicting human genitals and "female presenting nipples" (oh, those dastardly female nipples; I suppose "male presenting" nipples will remain allowed) regardless of if they are sexual, with some vague exemptions:
Adult content
This basically makes its policy on adult content just as restrictive as Facebook's is now. Facebook's policy is restrictive to the exent that even pictures of non-sexual nudity, such as an indigenous tribeswomen wearing her native clothing that does not cover her breasts, can run afoul of the rules. Grotesquely, Facebook allows images of real graphic violence and even gore to be posted, usually behind a filter. No such exemption exists for nudity or images dealing with any sort of sexuality.
I'm sure some of you will just write this off as a site banning porn and so don't really care. But it's much more than that. Many artists use/d the site to post their portfolios, which may have included works featuring nudity and/or sexuality, as is common for artists and art students. Now even illustrations depicting sexual acts featuring consenting adults and behind an opt-in filter will be banned. Also, much of the sexual imagery served marginalized communities, such as LGBTQ people and others who lack representation of their bodies and sexualities. There was a real social aspect to this, with people sharing their own creations, curating their own collections to followers and commenting.
Also, in the Tumblr CEO's self-serving statement about the new policy, I saw much talk about a "safer" and more "positive" Tumblr, but nothing about a plan to deal with hate speech that exists on the site, including a sizable white supremacist and neo-Nazi community on that site. So he is being disingenuous at best with such statements.
Either way, thank you, Apple and Tumblr, for taking yet another big dump on free expression and creativity, not to mention providing yet another example of the insidious corporatization of the Internet, reducing the freeness of it. I plan to delete my account on there soon, and many others have announced plans to leave the site. I also have a friend who is an artist and she uploaded her work to the site, including NSFW erotic art, plans to do, since her work will now be banned, too!
Let me also add that Tumblr already had an opt-in policy for such content and you could not see it at all unless you had an account and were logged in, so it certainly was not easy to come across explicit material on the site in the first place.
Apple Sucked Tumblr Into Its Walled Garden, Where Sex Is Bad - Motherboard
This year has been a bad year for adult free expression on the web. It started in April with the passage of the FOSTA-SESTA law, which is another nannying law that restricts the rights of adults in the name of "the children" and "victims of sex trafficking". This resulted in a number of sites with adult content either shuttering or shutting down the 18+ parts of their site, one of the most notable being Craigslist shutting down it's entire personals section in the US for fear of running afoul of this vague and wide-reaching law.
Craigslist Just Nuked Its Personal Ads Section Because of a Sex-Trafficking Bill
Now we hear today that Tumblr, one of the last major social media sites to allow adult content, will ban and purge such content starting December 17th. This due to a child porn panic, which led to the relatively puritanical Apple removing the Tumblr app from its App Store last last month.
This new policy will not only target hardcore porn but also photos and video depicting human genitals and "female presenting nipples" (oh, those dastardly female nipples; I suppose "male presenting" nipples will remain allowed) regardless of if they are sexual, with some vague exemptions:
Adult content
This basically makes its policy on adult content just as restrictive as Facebook's is now. Facebook's policy is restrictive to the exent that even pictures of non-sexual nudity, such as an indigenous tribeswomen wearing her native clothing that does not cover her breasts, can run afoul of the rules. Grotesquely, Facebook allows images of real graphic violence and even gore to be posted, usually behind a filter. No such exemption exists for nudity or images dealing with any sort of sexuality.
I'm sure some of you will just write this off as a site banning porn and so don't really care. But it's much more than that. Many artists use/d the site to post their portfolios, which may have included works featuring nudity and/or sexuality, as is common for artists and art students. Now even illustrations depicting sexual acts featuring consenting adults and behind an opt-in filter will be banned. Also, much of the sexual imagery served marginalized communities, such as LGBTQ people and others who lack representation of their bodies and sexualities. There was a real social aspect to this, with people sharing their own creations, curating their own collections to followers and commenting.
Also, in the Tumblr CEO's self-serving statement about the new policy, I saw much talk about a "safer" and more "positive" Tumblr, but nothing about a plan to deal with hate speech that exists on the site, including a sizable white supremacist and neo-Nazi community on that site. So he is being disingenuous at best with such statements.
Either way, thank you, Apple and Tumblr, for taking yet another big dump on free expression and creativity, not to mention providing yet another example of the insidious corporatization of the Internet, reducing the freeness of it. I plan to delete my account on there soon, and many others have announced plans to leave the site. I also have a friend who is an artist and she uploaded her work to the site, including NSFW erotic art, plans to do, since her work will now be banned, too!
Let me also add that Tumblr already had an opt-in policy for such content and you could not see it at all unless you had an account and were logged in, so it certainly was not easy to come across explicit material on the site in the first place.
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Why don't you try reading my OP, huh?
