Hey friends, just sharing the press release that was circulating yesterday about the Tumblr service which I know a lot of you still might be using to blog and share your photos outside of the confines of restricted mediums such as Facebook and Instagram. For those who are in the dark about the medium, it is essentially the place where one can post just about anything that they feel like posting and after December 17th that will still be possible – provided the “anything” is not viewed as Adult Content in nature. That means anything nekkid and for sure anything sexual in its post. Here is the press statement.

The Press Release:
A better, more positive Tumblr Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?
Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal 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.

Why are we doing this?
It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?
Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time. Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio, CEO

*** end of press release ***

Piercing Ken Thoughts: The PiercingMetal Website has been using Tumblr as a “feed” of content from the music and geek culture website and the occasional item from “The Chronicles” for about nine years now and that is all its used for. This change doesn’t affect our posts at all but when numerous friends of the brand are dancers, models and actresses whose work occasionally involves some nudity, this will really impact what they are able to post. It’s good that they are seeking to eliminate the younger porn stuff that is out there because that is a necessary action but I am certain these automated mechanisms will be like a scythe through the wheat and cutting other accounts down indiscriminately. To any of my friends whose work involves what can be viewed as “Adult” in overall nature, I suggest that you get right on top of creating either a WordPress or BlogSpot account and then import your sum total content into these mediums. Sure, you will have to make note that the content on the account is adult in nature but its better than losing it and you should be able to continue along. Check to make sure it all works fine while you still have some window of time. You should then download any of your images for good measure and then DELETE your Tumblr account so your information is not available to be sold off should they fold up. There is a part of me that believes that this action is being taken to make the service more interesting to prospective buyers so who knows what the real plan is. I’ll leave the links to start accounts down below. How you choose to proceed is entirely up to you, but I would advise you get on this and import the sum total of your content into the new account ASAP before its impossible to access and most likely eventually just deleted from the Tumblr medium. The import process isn’t too difficult and there are YouTube videos and tech documentation all over the place on how to do this now. If you use a Blogspot account it will warn site visitors about adult themed content. I don’t know if WordPress does the same despite my being a user of that medium for years. Each has free tiers unless you want to secure a domain and proper hosting. I would recommend WordPress since we really like that for our content. Good luck.

Blogspot: https://www.blogger.com/

WordPress: https://www.wordpress.com/