Today, Explained - Tumblr's war on sex

Episode Date: December 17, 2018

Tumblr is removing adult content from its platform today. Vox’s Aja Romano says it's about much more than banning “female-presenting nipples". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's this truism online that if you can think of it, there's porn of it. And maybe nowhere is this more true than on Tumblr. You're into Elmo? Balls! You know, balls! How about Elmo porn? You into that movie Inception? How about some dreamy Inception porn? You into Star Trek?

Like OG Star Trek, Spock, and Uhura? Tumblr's got you covered. It's five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. You might have a Tumblr that's like porn stars who look like Spock and Uhura. And the entire Tumblr might not necessarily be explicit, but it might be eroticized. Spock might be shirtless. In some GIFs or images, Uhura might be shirtless, you know? In some GIFs or images, they may be having sex. But the object of the Tumblr seems to be about

finding cool new ways to represent the characters. And yes, they're having sex as kind of a bonus, but that's not the ultimate goal, if that makes sense. Asia Romano writes about the internet for Vox and says, because Tumblr is a place where people combine their love of popular culture with their love of sex, it's drawn a whole different set of the internet. There are 451 million different blogs, the last time someone counted. This platform immediately took off among young millennials and gen wires. And so too many of its younger users, too many of its women, its queer and genderqueer people, its people of color and many other people who were, who are typically marginalized from, I think, other spaces on the internet.

Tumblr was sort of a really warm and welcoming home and a really unique one in a lot of ways. But today that all goes away. Tumblr is removing adult content today. And when I say removing adult content, I mean basically explicit material, specifically photos, videos, or GIFs displaying explicit material, as well as illustrations that depict explicit sex acts. And there are hazy boundaries. One of the exceptions is that if you're breastfeeding, that's okay. But if you present non-breastfeeding, quote unquote, female presenting nipples, then those have to go. So Asia, before we get into why Tumblr is doing this today, could you

give us a brief history of Tumblr for those who aren't that familiar? Sure. Tumblr was founded in 2007, and it was initially meant to be a quote-unquote micro-blogging service. So the idea of Tumblr initially was that it would be kind of like Twitter in that it would have short posts, but that you would be able to reblog these posts, basically kind of like retweets, but blogging instead of tweeting. And you would also be able to post photos very easily. It would be a very photo and image and gif-heavy service. And I think that proved to be really unique to Tumblr as a platform, the way that GIFs were sort of bandied about

and the way that they were used on the platform and still are used on the platform. And Tumblr users essentially immediately started evolving this platform to do things that weren't necessarily in the original scope and concept when it was founded. Who's going to Tumblr looking for porn? The vast majority of the content, the consumers were female. In fact, I think one study found that I think 82% of the producers of the content, so like the porn itself, like more explicit porn, were male, but 68% of the consumers

of that content were female. So when exactly does adult content on Tumblr become a problem? There was a certain amount of child pornography that began circulating on Tumblr. So suddenly in November, this became a huge problem. Tumblr's app was recently removed from the App Store, reportedly after images of child sexual abuse appeared on it. And Tumblr's immediate response was to, obviously to get rid of the child pornography, but to do kind of a light purging, I guess,

of many adult content blogs and producers. That also targeted many queer content creators and queer members of the community. They essentially went after specific users and tags and people producing a lot of content under like the not safe for work tag and so forth. And is this around the time they announced their new adult content ban? There was actually about two or three weeks in between. I think they were waiting to see if Apple would restore them to the App Store, but Apple did not restore them to the App Store. And what exactly does the ban say? It said that it would ban many categories of adult

content, including, quote, photos, videos, or GIFs, as well as, quote, illustrations that depict sex acts. So that's pretty broad. And how does that work? How does Tumblr police millions of blogs at the same time? Well, the idea is that this filtering and this flagging will be done algorithmically, and that has already caused an entirely predictable, colossal number of problems. Tumblr users immediately started receiving emails notifying them that their content had been flagged. And although you're supposed to be able to appeal things that have been flagged inaccurately

as explicit when they're not explicit, there are a hilarious number of stories where, A, to begin with, the things that the filters are flagging are just hilarious and completely off the wall. There were, you know, images of fruit that were being flagged. There were images of fully dressed people in black and white photos being flagged, cute animals, images of the desert, innocent shirtless men kissing. And in a very, very famous one, Tumblr's own reblog of its post announcing the ban was flagged for someone. Obviously, this isn't really a foolproof system. One of the most revealing moments is that an image that sort of became a meme through Tumblr, this famous image of truth coming out of her well to shame mankind. It's a famous painting from the 19th century,

I believe. And it's got a picture of a woman stepping out of a well, looking straight at the viewer. She's got an angry expression on her face, and she's completely naked. And Tumblr feminists and progressives have sort of picked this image up and used it for a variety of shade-filled things, if that makes sense. So this very famous image was flagged as explicit. No one is having sex in it, and the only thing that is happening in it is that there's a woman who has no clothes on, which is supposed to be one of the protected types of content that is exempt from this ban. But I think even more tellingly, this particular image is something that is organic within Tumblr culture, how Tumblr culture

exists to sort of be a subversive and disruptive element within culture at large. And there's a very real and I think very valid fear that these things will all be threatened under this new ban. Coming up, where do people go online to really let their freak flags fly? This is Today Explained. No big deal. One time I had to interview Terry Gross for work. And I asked her, Terry, what podcast do you like? And she said, the longest, shortest time. The, and all the surprises that happen when you're in

a family, when you're raising other humans, or when you're being raised by them. In one episode, a woman finds out that she can't become a mom without a hysterectomy. And in another story, you meet three people who say polyamory makes them better partners and better parents. Find the longest, shortest time wherever you find your podcasts. Asia, I think when you hear about Star Trek erotica and how this algorithm is banning images of the desert. Like it all just sounds really funny, but who does this adult content ban affect and how? Directly, the people who will be immediately affected by it are sex workers who use Tumblr for, say, sex education purposes and networking within their communities. So that's one very vulnerable

community that I think will suffer from this. Another one, obviously, are artists, people who make illustrated and possibly eroticized illustrated art. People in the adult film industry obviously will be hurt by it because they're promoting themselves on Tumblr. And then, of course, people in fandom, people who are there for all kinds of illustrated art as well as eroticized art, and people who are in the BDSM community, and people who are on the fringes of other mainstream corners of the internet. So did all these groups try and fight this ban on adult content when it was announced earlier this month? Oh, sure. Immediately there was a Change.org petition. There were massive protests on Tumblr and Twitter, pretty much all across the internet. And I think that's really revealing because many

of them have just wanted to be left alone to do their own thing. So when they're speaking out this loudly and this angrily in public ways, in ways that feel very mainstream and get circulated very quickly, that doesn't always happen. This isn't the first time you've heard about sex workers or artists in the adult industry getting shut out of space. I mean, earlier this year, we spoke to you about this Bill Foster, SESTA, and Backpage, right? Right. And a lot of the harmful effects that we feared would take place have since, in fact, taken

place. And we've seen these types of sex work communities and other types of marginalized communities, like the fetish communities, being shut down and being gradually shoved off their faces, like exactly what's happening now with Tumblr. I do want to say, too, that this happened many years before in 2007 because of the platform that the community was on deciding to very abruptly crack down on adult content. That platform was LiveJournal, which had up until then sort of a very hastily and shoddily put together quote-unquote adult content ban that resulted in very popular communities

and very popular artists being unfairly banned. And this basically created a giant rift between LiveJournal and its user base. I don't think they ever really recovered from that. They ultimately wound up selling to a Russian-based host. And now LiveJournal is basically run by the Russians. And it's not really a safe space for anyone anymore. Where did all the live journalists go? They went to essentially Tumblr. I mean, some of them went to Twitter and other sites, but many, many, many of them went to Tumblr.

So where will people go now that Tumblr is changing in a similar fashion? Part of this question involves who's leaving and what are they on Tumblr for to begin with? Artists are probably going to be more likely to go to sites like Instagram and DeviantArt, which already have thriving art communities set up to sort of welcome them. But doesn't Instagram have similar rules about female presenting nipples and nudity and adult content? to build platforms to welcome this new Tumblr diaspora, but who haven't necessarily thought these problems through and aren't necessarily handling the sudden influx of Tumblr users well. I just kind of wonder, like, you know, I think about like scrolling through Instagram versus scrolling through Tumblr. Like I've scrolled through Instagram at work and never been like,

oh my God, there are people having sex right now. But when looking at Tumblr at work, sometimes in my previous job, I sometimes accidentally stumbled upon porn while in the office. And the idea of stumbling upon child pornography while at my office is petrifying to me. Like, how does Tumblr toe the line? It seems like they had this sort of freer ecosystem in which you could accidentally end up looking at child porn. And now maybe they're overcorrecting and they're just taking straight up art down and harming these communities that were not nefarious and that were flourishing. Was there a middle ground somewhere that they missed? I think so. And I think I don't necessarily know that they did miss it. I want to say for the

record, I've never encountered child pornography on Tumblr. But the middle ground for me, I believe, would have been for Tumblr to be something other than Tumblr. If Tumblr had not been a corporation, if it had not been run by profit-driven interests and growth-driven interests and this need to report to investors, it could have said, OK, we don't need to be on the App Store. We don't need to cross that line and deal with any type of decision-making that will require us to censor our users. But had Apple not stepped in and been like, you guys got child porn, would Tumblr have been self-policing child pornography more? I mean, I definitely think that they needed Apple to draw their attention to the problem, but I also don't think that they would have failed to handle it on their own. You do see occasional porn at Tumblr when you're just scrolling through a random tag

at work. But also when you think about the difference in Instagram and Tumblr culture, you're scrolling through Instagram at work, but you're getting this very homogenized, whitewashed, almost surreally posh, static, impossible, beautiful view of the world at all times. You get none of that on Tumblr. You get wildness. You get people having mental health breakdowns. You get people yelling at each other about, you know, third-wave feminism and intersectionality and progressive issues

that are light years beyond any other platform on the internet. You know, you get people making gift sets from fandom and geek culture. And you get all this wildness and ingenuity and people starting art movements like Seapunk and Vaporwave and Glitch Art and all of these things that you just would never have on a very, very tightly controlled, heavily image policed site like Instagram. And this is what happens when you ask a community where all of that stuff is flourishing to try and make decisions about speech and censorship that like the United States as a country hasn't quite figured out yet. Exactly. And obviously, these questions are consuming every single social media platform

that we have right now. You know, one of the main complaints from Tumblr users is, oh, why are you banning all the porn porn but not the Nazis? And the answer is they're trying to ban the Nazis. They're trying to sort of deal fairly with all of these questions. But the questions just are endless and are growing exponentially. Even moving to different platforms won't necessarily make it better. But I do think platforms that are less profit-driven might be able to presumably answer questions for their users in ways that don't necessarily default to censorship. Asia Romano writes about the internet and pop culture for Vox.

I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained.