Tumblr Is Banning Porn and the Robots Are Already Getting It Wrong

So Tumblr announced last week that starting December 17th, they're banning "adult content" site-wide. Not age-gating it, not tucking it behind a login wall like they probably should've done years ago, just wiping it out. And I want to talk about this not because I have some big stake in Tumblr porn (I don't, really, my Tumblr is mostly a graveyard of design blog reblogs from like 2013) but because the way they're doing it is already a disaster and its only been a few days.

Here's the thing nobody at Tumblr corporate seems to have thought through: they're using an automated image classifier to flag "adult content," and its flagging everything. I've seen screenshots going around of a cartoon fox getting flagged. A photo of a bag of grapes got flagged. Someone's own post announcing they were quitting the platform in protest got flagged as adult content, which is almost funny if you squint at it. The bar for what counts as explicit is apparently "does this image have skin tones and any kind of curve in it," and thats not an exaggeration by much.

I get why theyre doing this. Verizon (yes, Verizon owns Tumblr now, by way of Yahoo, by way of Oath, its a whole mess of a corporate lineage) needs the app back in Apple's App Store after it got yanked over a child exploitation content issue that got discovered on the platform late last month. That part I actually think is reasonable. Nobody's defending CSAM being findable on a major platform, obviously get that off there immediately. But the response has been to build a blunt instrument and swing it at the entire site instead of actually staffing up a moderation team that knows the difference between explicit content and, I dont know, a Renaissance painting.

And this is the part that bugs me the most, honestly. Tumblr's entire cultural identity for the better part of a decade has been built partly on being the place where weird, horny, niche communities could exist without getting swept up in Facebook-style "real name, family friendly" policing. Fandom stuff, art blogs, a huge amount of LGBTQ content and community that formed specifically because it had nowhere else that felt safe. A lot of that isn't porn. Some of it is adjacent to porn. Some of it is just art that happens to have a body in it. An algorithm trained to pattern-match skin percentage in a frame cannot tell these apart, and Tumblr apparently knows this, because their own help post admits the flagging "won't be perfect" and there will be an appeals process. Which, sure, but when you're auto-flagging on a platform with hundreds of millions of posts, "there's an appeals queue" is basically a formality nobody's queue will ever clear.

I'll say the quiet part too: I think this kills Tumblr as a place people actively use, not overnight, but over the next year or so. Not because porn is the only reason people were there — plenty of blogs on there have never had a nude in their life — but because the vibe of "this is a place with fewer rules than everywhere else" was the actual product. Take that away and its just a worse, slower Twitter with a worse app. I don't think Verizon particularly cares if that happens, to be honest. I don't think Tumblr has been a priority acquisition for them in any meaningful sense since the day the deal closed.

Small unrelated aside because I can't help myself: I also saw this week that a bunch of exposed printers around the world got hijacked to print out messages telling people to subscribe to PewDiePie on YouTube, because his subscriber lead over T-Series has been shrinking and apparently some corner of the internet has decided this is a hill worth exploiting insecure IoT devices over. Deeply stupid, extremely 2018, genuinely funny that this is the timeline we're in where people weaponize your office printer for a YouTube subscriber count beef.

Anyway. December 17th is the date to watch on the Tumblr thing. I give it maybe two weeks before the "adult content" filter has flagged half the art blogs I follow and the appeals threads turn into their own genre of content.