#freedomofspeech

staff:

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

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.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

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.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio
CEO

Tumblr fucking sucks! Where are people going to go for freedom of expression to large masses of people. This always was a website where people could freely talk about things that are considered taboo in a normal way. Now Tumblr isgoing to destroy this community. I’ve always love this site because it promoted people to share and nothing was fake or filtered through a lens. In this great country of the United States we are free and yes some things that we are allowed to do because of our freedom maybe shouldn’t be allowed but destroying this temple of freedom that used to be Tumblr is the worst mistake they could make.

Just saw this at the top of my newsfeed and it doesn’t make me happy! Someone needs to start a petition now!

So this is quite a worry… a ‘clarification’ by an appeal judge (which therefore sets a precedent for future judgements) means that an 'audience of one’ still counts as 'publication’ of written material. i.e. if you are writing chat online that is being read by a single other person your words are considered a 'publication’ for legal purposes - meaning they are covered by the Obscene Publications Act. So, in the UK, a dirty private sex chat with another consenting and happy individual opens you up for prosecution for publishing obscenity. More details of this are in this article.

For those not familiar with the UK law we have an Obscene Publications Act, which makes it illegal to publish material that will tend to “deprave or corrupt” (things like this blog, I guess). However, it should be pointed out that the act does not itself define what will 'deprave and corrupt’, and it is left up to an individual jury to make a decision on an individual basis. Thankfully, in the past juries have tended to come down on the liberal, accepting, side of things (e.g. in this gay porn case some fairly hardcore stuff was found to be acceptable). But that doesn’t stop a prosecution being brought, and who knows who is going to be in a particular jury on a particular case. 

This is not a good situation to start with. But this latest ruling is a hell of a lot worse. What it means is that a private chat with one other person can be held up to the same scrutiny as a published novel, magazine article or film. So if you’re in the UK and you happen to be enjoying a text based necro-beastial-snuff-torture fantasy with someone else who happens to like that kind of thing (using a private media where there is no chance of anyone else seeing it or being exposed to the particular delights of your twisted little ideas) you can theoretically be prosecuted on the same basis as if you had mass produced this material.

Now, personally I think it would be wrong to prosecute someone for mass producing these materials anyway - if it doesn’t hurt anyone, just disgusts people, what of it? Being offended isn’t that big a deal. But the idea that you can be prosecuted when it is done in complete private… that’s just hideous. Utterly hideous.

Again, thankfully British juries have tended not to want to prosecute. But that’s not the point here - being charged in the first place is terrible enough. Let alone the very, very important principle that what I write and say is my business and not that of the government.

And lest we forget, the UK also has a law banning extreme pornography. Which makes illegal pornography that depicts “an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life.” So… erm… oops.

Usually, in the UK, as with most liberal countries I guess, we get by by mostly ignoring the changes to the law and the rules and just sort of assuming we’ll be left alone to do our own thing most of the time. The 'it probably won’t happen to me’ attitude (which most people, in my experience, also apply to drugs). But these rulings are setting a tone, setting precidents, theoretically endangering us and those with opinions, feelings and interests similar to us. The chances of us as an individual being prosecuted are low, but the chances of one of us being prosecuted… well, that just goes up. 

We have to do what we can to keep the pressure on to win freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom to explore our kinks, fantasies, and desires. We wish to do things which are non-damaging but still unacceptable to the vast majority of people. We are pushing the envelope of ways to live, ways to think, ways to feel, ways to fuck, ways to form relationships and the visceral experiences of life. Travellers into extreme sensations, we will always remain demons to many, whilst knowing we are angels to others. We have to fight the prudish, fearful, conservative rulings of ignorant, small minded, control freaks.

Watch “Why Free Speech Triggers The Left” on YouTube