Porn Will Be Banned From Tumblr Shortly Before Christmas

In news that was surely orchestrated by a tag team of the Grinch and multiple southern churches, the porn police has struck once again – and this time it’s a slap in the face to all us budget hoes who are too cheap to shell out for a Sean Cody membership. Starbucks last week surprised us in acknowledging people were watching porn while they sipped lattes and using the in-store WiFi and said they were going to put the kibosh on that with new internet filters. Now, Tumblr – a blogging platform I have no way of proving but would still guess is 9000% comprised of porn – said it is going to Scrooge us all and ban porn in the next two weeks.

The Verge says the porn ban goes into effect December 17 and is almost certainly a result of it getting booted from the Apple app store after child porn was popping up on some accounts. Tumblr posted a line to its official blog that summed it up: “Adult content will no longer be allowed here.” Photos, videos, and even gifs of wieners and other human genitalia are getting the boot along with any media and illustrations of sex acts or female nipples —  so expect a whole new round of that #freethenipple movement. Tumblr is already letting people know their porn accounts will be made private in order to prevent them from showing up on feeds/in the eyes of the young, innocent, and horny. The process is also expected to take a long-ass time since, well, there are a lot of smutty accounts on Tumblr. Cute cat shit is saved for Instagram!

For now, Tumblr is emailing users who have posted adult content flagged by algorithms and notifying them that their content will soon be hidden from view. Posts with porn content will be set to private, which will prevent them from being reblogged or shared elsewhere in the Tumblr community.

Users have a chance to appeal Tumblr’s decision in situations where they think there’s been a mistake, and the platform admits there’s a chance that the automated tools it’s using could make errors. It’s a process that could take a while, as a bulk of Tumblr posts feature explicit content. Users who run adult blogs can also export their content before the change takes place in order to save what they have.

Explicit blogs will be allowed to remain on the service, but they’ll be heavily censored for all visitors

There are some exceptions to the rule, like nude classical statues and political protests that feature nudity, so it should be interesting to see how many people try to get around the rules by captioning a post with “#bareback” immediately followed by “#barebackingforhealthcarereform.”

Pic: Tumblr