These included sexually-themed art and illustrations, and sex workers who use the platform to sell commissions for fans. In November, some Tumblr users started reporting being banned without warning-in some cases, permanently-for posting NSFW content. In February, Tumblr turned Safe Mode on by default for all its users, essentially making adult content creators invisible to the rest of the platform unless users opted out of the feature manually. This writing has been on the wall for a while. “For many, that's the one place we could find porn that represents us, made by indie performers who created their own content outside of an often racist, transmisogynist, fatphobic industry" ![]() That’s also becoming less and less true in the aftermath of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, signed in April, as sites have cracked down on NSFW communities or shut down altogether for fear of repercussions of hosting adult content. The value of Tumblr for NSFW creators and fans was in the autonomy to curate something original, and the freedom to express and share what they’re into-something that can’t be replaced by algorithmically-suggested porn on the rest of the internet. “We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community,” he wrote. Tumblr’s leadership seems to believe that the community using Tumblr for adult content is the same as any other porn site-showing a serious disconnect with how its users actually interact and connect on its own platform. ![]() Tumblr’s decision is even more disappointing because it’s obvious in D’Onofrio’s explanation that Tumblr leadership does not understand the important role that Tumblr held in the adult content community. Read more: Sex Workers Pioneered the Early Internet-and It Screwed Them Over But the decision to get rid of adult content wholesale is consistent both with the corporatization and sanitization of the internet that Apple has led the charge on. We don’t know for sure whether Tumblr made this final decision under pressure from Apple, or because the platform felt like it could not competently moderate the platform any longer. Apple does not allow apps “that contain user generated content that is frequently pornographic.” In 2016, Apple famously deleted all third-party Reddit apps that allowed users to toggle NSFW posts on and off even now, it is impossible to access porn on an iOS Reddit app unless you jump through various hoops. Steve Jobs famously suggested that “folks who want porn can buy an Android phone,” and Apple has repeatedly leveraged its unprecedented power over millions of smartphones to sanitize the apps that are available on iPhones. "There are fan artists who stopped creating because of the shit they've been put through there"īut there are fewer and fewer mainstream sites and services that support porn and adult content, and much of that attitude has grown out of Apple’s strict controls over the App Store and the iOS ecosystem. In a blog post, Tumblr CEO Jeff D’Onofrio wrote that “there are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content.” Monday, Tumblr announced it would ban adult content altogether. After being removed from the App Store but before making the announcement that it would ban all adult content, Tumblr began to purge some adult and NSFW artists from the site. ![]() But thousands of sites manage to effectively moderate to keep their platforms free of child porn, while allowing adult content more broadly. ![]() No site should allow child porn, obviously.
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