NEW YORK — Tumblr unveiled its new community guidelines today, announcing that the platform now welcomes “a broader range of expression, creativity and art” including “the naked human form.”
As XBIZ reported, in late September Tumblr introduced a new feature enabling users to label posts as featuring “sexual themes,” defined as content which “contains sexually suggestive subject matter, such as erotic writing or imagery.”
Like today’s new community guidelines, that news was shared via a post on Tumblr's staff blog.
A week later, Matt Mullenweg — CEO of Automattic, the company that owns Tumblr — explained in an extensive blogpost that he thinks it is currently impossible for the internet to be “porn-friendly” because, among other reasons, “credit card companies are anti-porn.”
Automattic, which also owns popular blogging software WordPress, acquired a failing Tumblr from Verizon in 2019, after the platform’s numbers crumbled following its deletion of all adult content.
In his post, titled “Why ‘Go Nuts, Show Nuts’ Doesn’t Work in 2022,” Mullenweg described himself as “personally extremely libertarian in terms of what consenting adults should be able to share” but expressed his view that “no modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007.”
'Sexually Explicit Acts' Still Verboten
Today’s announcement of the new community guidelines expanded on the earlier news by noting, “even if your creations contain nudity, mature subject matter, or sexual themes, you can now share them on Tumblr using the appropriate Community Label so that everyone remains in control of the types of content they see on their dash.”
However, other anti-sexual-expression content policies established in 2018 will remain the same, as the new post clarified by listing legal, consensual sex acts alongside other prohibited content.
“We still don’t allow hate, spam, violent threats, or anything illegal and visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits on Tumblr,” the post noted, adding, “if you want to know more about that, our CEO Matt recently explained why it’s not feasible for us to safely and successfully support porn communities at this time.”
Should users come across content that falls under those categories — a list that lumps legal, consensual sex in with hate and violence — Tumblr asks that they report it.