Tumblr's adult content ban dismays some users: 'It was a safe space'

Nyx Serafino says she spent most of her life feeling like she was society’s “dirty secret”. A gender-fluid sex worker struggling with her identity and childhood abuse, she said: “There is absolutely nothing about me that fits in a box.”

When Serafino, 28, of Las Vegas, discovered Tumblr in 2010, it wasn’t the cure-all she sought.

But it was a place where there were others like her, who had similar questions, similar problems, similar stories. It was a place where they could celebrate each other, sometimes with explicit and sex-positive content, where “it was ok to just ‘be’,” she said.

“I realized,” Serafino told the Guardian, “I wasn’t alone.”

But with the microblogging site cracking down on pornography later this month, Serafino and other Tumblr users like her are concerned about what such changes could mean to the marginalized communities who have found, within Tumblr’s more tolerant stance toward legal adult material, a safe haven to explore and establish their sexual and gender identities.

“There are so many different people that this impacts in so many different ways,” said Ysabel Gerrard, a lecturer in the UK’s University of Sheffield specializing in social media and society. “In particular, it feels like a big middle finger to women, to sex workers, and to queer kids. It’s saying, ‘We don’t want you here.’”

According to Tumblr’s chief executive, Jeff D’Onofrio, Tumblr will remove all adult material and ban all content including photos, videos or gifs that depict sex acts or “show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples” from 17 December.

In a statement Monday, D’Onofrio said: “Without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.”

Elsewhere in the statement, D’Onofrio added: “We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your per

sonal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.”

But for some in the LGBT community and also the sex worker community, there were concerns. They said Tumblr, founded in 2007, was where they felt comfortable expressing themselves because of the allowance for explicit adult content. Serafino posted videos and photographs of herself and received body-positive feedback from others.

“It was a great place to mix art and adult content,” she said. “I could put out my perspective on things, post a song, and feel comfortable in my own skin. It took a long time for that to happen for me.”

Jin Sol Kim, a 27-year-old PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada, who is researching the politics behind platform design and technologies, said the creativity fostered by the site allows for acceptance of different sexual and gender identities.

“Tumblr is known as being this creative environment and space where you can experiment, where you can put a little bit about yourself out there that you aren’t comfortable putting out on other platforms,” Kim said. “The cumulative effect of its design elements allowed for people to express themselves in ways that are different than on other platforms.

“For the LGBTQA community and other marginalized communities, Tumblr has more of an appeal because other platforms have more censorship built in … It created that safe space for them.”

The result was a topsy-turvy blogosphere of slash fiction, erotic art, and niche sexual preference communities, coexisting alongside non-adult content of fan pages, personal diaries, and teen snark. Tumblr has tried to prevent these two worlds from intersecting, but Apple removed the Tumblr app from its app store last month after its filtering system inadvertently allowed child abuse images into the network.

“On the one hand, [the ban on adult content is] not surprising,” said Gerrard, of the University of Sheffield. “At the end of the day, they’re a business, and it’s the two-sided coin of social media. We want you to come here and create your identity and create a profile and give us content and be you and be free. And then it just got too big and now they have to have rules. I think they’re covering their own backs.”

But it was disappointing, Gerrard said.

“By taking too hard a line on this and … communicating it wrong, I feel like they are pushing away the very people who make the platform what it is,” she said. “They are pushing away the people who want this space, who need this space, for reasons of safety and for reasons of mental health. They are pushing these people away and I genuinely do not know where they are going to go.”

Tumblr insists that the site will still allow for non-sexualised images of women’s nipples, in situations such as works of art or breastfeeding, but experts say this will be difficult for the company to police.

“If you want to watch porn, you can go to PornHub, but Tumblr gave us something different,” Gerrard said. “I think from a content moderation perspective, a lot of the pornography we see on Tumblr is so aestheticized. I don’t know how, on a practical level, we are going to be able to draw this line.”

Kim pointed out that many in the transgender community turn to Tumblr to find others who have transitioned or are considering transition. Photographs of “top surgery”, or female-to-male chest reassignment surgery, could be considered “femalepresenting nipples”, Kim said. Thus an important resource to a confused and scared teenager may suddenly be removed from the site.

“This is where they go to access sensitive information,” she said. “It’s not like Tumblr is the only place where this kind of information exists. But it’s a different dynamic. There’s an intimacy to Tumblr, between the followers.”

Serafino said many within her community were heartbroken about the ban, but that she would “continue to look for a new platform that celebrates individuality and love without silencing the very group that made it what it is today”.

“Censoring sexuality doesn’t help anyone step toward positivity,” she said.