Slate: Tumblr Should Not Ban Porn (It should welcome more porn!)
Tumblr has been a safe and reliable place to look at pornographic images for more than a decade whether those images were drawings, GIFs, photographs, or short videos. But that’s changing in two weeks. The platform’s CEO announced in a lengthy Tumblr post on Monday that the service plans to ban all adult content. There will be some exceptions, like for art with nudity, but for the most part, the days are numbered for existing Tumblr posts featuring nudity or other pornographic content. The policy comes two weeks after Tumblr was kicked off the Apple App Store because some child pornography reportedly slipped through its filters. It’s unclear if Tumblr didn’t respond to just these reports of child porn fast enough, or if this is a long-standing problem.
It’s certainly true that Tumblr, which now is owned by Verizon, needs to work vigilantly and hire people to make sure that its services aren’t used to abuse minors and traffic in child pornography. Pedophilic material is something that all live-to-post services need to seriously contend with and actively engage in rooting out, whether they are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter’s Periscope—where I found last year that apparent pedophiles were frequently preying on young users—or Tumblr. But the platform’s fix is the equivalent of hammering a nail with a skyscraper, only to have it slip through an open window. It’s an overreaching solution that won’t protect children who are victims of child pornography, seekers of which will all but certainly find another place to go.
What banning “adult content” will do, however, is eradicate one of the few mainstream, safe, and non-taboo places where people could participate in communities that openly congregate around sex and sexuality. Sex is great, and it’s no wonder that people like to consume sexual images—much of the internet is dedicated to this. Knowing that one could roll onto Tumblr, a very popular social media site, find a blog dedicated to whatever flavor of porn one likes, and look at images that turn one on, made the whole ordeal of seeking sexual imagery less daunting, demeaning, and dangerous.
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