Tumblr Banning All Adult Content

Innula Zenovka

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Images of Jesus and superheroes caught up in Tumblr porn ban

Ballet dancers, superheroes and a picture of Christ have all fallen foul of Tumblr’s new pornography ban, after the images were flagged up as explicit content by the blogging site’s artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

The company, which is owned by the US media conglomerate Verizon, said on Monday it would ban pornography from its site – and defined the term as covering any depiction of “real-life human genitals”, or “female-presenting nipples”.

Once the ban comes into effect on 17 December, any post containing such imagery will be deleted. But in order to moderate billions of posts in such a short timeframe, Tumblr has turned to AI tools that appear unable to distinguish clothed from naked figures, let alone tell whether a nipple is presenting as female.

The actor and Tumblr user Wil Wheaton posted one example: an image search for “beautiful men kissing”, which was flagged as explicit “within 30 seconds of me posting it”.

“These images are not explicit,” Wheaton wrote. “These pictures show two adults, engaging in consensual kissing. That’s it. It isn’t violent, it isn’t pornographic. It’s literally just two adult humans sharing a kiss.”

Other users chronicled flagged posts, including historical images of (clothed) women of colour, a photoset of the actor Sebastian Stan wearing a selection of suits with no socks on, an oil painting of Christ wearing a loincloth, a still of ballet dancers and a drawing of Wonder Woman carrying fellow superhero Harley Quinn. None of the images violate Tumblr’s stated policy.
Plenty more examples in the article.
 
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Noodles

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This Tumblr thing, someone mentioned Mastodon. Recently 4chan has split SFW and NSFW off between 4channel.org and 4chan.org.


I almost wonder if there is something else going on here with this sudden crack down on porn.
 

Bartholomew Gallacher

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Well I loved this Tumblr "All things Ikea", or something, where somebody looked at porn flicks for occurrences of Ikea furniture, and named it.

Anyway, given the fact that Tumblr belongs to an American company I was always amazed on their relaxed stance on adult contents, so this move now did not surprise me at all.
 

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One of the better memes about this so far.

 

Porsupah Ree

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I almost wonder if there is something else going on here with this sudden crack down on porn.
I'm leaning toward SESTA/FOSTA underlying the CEO's nervousness. Quite possibly they're even just personally prudish, but when you've got folks like the current White House clown car brigade being perfectly happy to enforce it, in order to wipe sex workers off the map, feeling awkward about having anything risqué on your systems has some practical basis.

How is/was Tumblr's advertising served? If it's sourced through third parties, that's a conceivable separate issue - even SLU fell foul, as I recall, of Google being unwilling to associate itself with a den of iniquity such as this.
 

Porsupah Ree

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As an addendum, I just recalled - another factor may be all their "partners". If you recall, when Oath began pulling their GDPR shenanigans, you did initially have the option to opt out from all categories of tracking, or, each individual company, perhaps not expecting anyone to actually go through that list. I did, and by the time I got to the end, having turned off each checkbox and cut & pasted each screenful as text, I ran 'wc -l' on the resulting text file, to give me the number of "partners" they sold all your tracked data to: 299. Yes, just under three hundred.

ad4mat
One Person Health, Inc. (DBA Adacado) ADARA MEDIA UNLIMITED
AdBlade
AdButler
AdCentric
AdClear
Add2 Avolution
Addroid
AddThis
Adelphic
Adform A/S
AdGear (Bloom)
Adimo
Adinfinity (Viziads)
ADITION technologies AG
Adjust
Adledge
Adloox SA
Adman
admetrics GmbH
Admotion SRL
Adobe
Adrime (now Weborama)
AdRoll Inc
AdSpirit GmbH
AdTriba
AdUp
Advanse
ADventori SAS
Advrtas/Outlyer Tech
AdYouLike
Adzerk
Affiliate Window
Almondnet (Datonics)
Alphonso
Amazon
AMG (Adconion Media Group)
Aniview
Annalect
PulsePoint, Inc.
AppNexus Inc.
AppsFlyer
Apsalar
ARAnet (now Brandpoint)
Arrivalist
Audience2media
Augur
Avid Media Ltd
Bannerflow
Barometric
Batch Media
Beintoo
BIDSWITCH GmbH
BlueCava
BlueKai
Brainient
Brand.net
Bridgetrack
Brightcom
RhythmOne, LLC
C3 Metrics
Cablato
Cake Marketing
Cardlytics
Index Exchange, Inc.
Catalina
Cedato
Celtra
Chango
ChoiceStream
Cint AB
Clickbooth
Clinch Labs
Clipcentric
Cobalt (CDK)
Collective Media (now Visto)
comScore, Inc.
Comune
Connexity
Connextra
Conversant Europe Ltd.
Conversion Logic
Coremetrics (now IBM Customer Analytics) Cornerstone
Crimtan Holdings Limited
Criteo SA
Cuebiq
Dashbid
Datalicious
DataLogix
Dataxu, Inc.
DBA Gamut
Dimestore (GFK)
DMA Institute
Double Positive
DoubleClick
DoubleVerify
Drawbridge, Inc.
Dynad
E-Planning
eBay
Econda
Effective Measure
Egentic
Emediate
Engage
Ensighten
Epom
ESV Digital
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Everquote
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Factor Eleven
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Foursquare
Freckle IOT
FreeWheel
Fuisz Media
Gemius
Genius Monkey
Ghostery
Gimbal
Goldspot Media
GrapeShot
Groovinads
GroupM Server
GumGum, Inc.
hbfstech
HIRO
Hitokuse
Hurra
I Behavior KBMG
IAG
Impact Radius
Improve Digital
Ingenius Technologies
Innity
Innovation Interactive (Netmining)
Innovid
InSkin
Inspired Mobile
Integral Ad Science / IAS(AdSafe)
intelliAd
Interpolls
Interrogare
Invite Media
iPromote
Jetpack Digital
Jivox
Knorex
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Korrelate
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LifeStreet Corporation
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Lightspeed Research
Likqid Media (LKQD)
Linkstorm
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LiveRamp, Inc.
LnData
LoopMe Ltd
Lotame Solutions, Inc.
Lucid (Federated Sample)
Magnetic
Marchex Sales
Marketing Science Consulting Group
Markit On Demand
Massmotionmedia
Maxpoint Interactive
Media Force
Media6Degrees (now Dstillery)
Mediaglu
Medialets
MediaMath, Inc.
Mediasmart
MediaWallah
Meetrics
Metapeople
Metrixlab
Miaozhen
Millward Brown Digital
Mixpo
MOAT
myThings
Navegg
Neodata
NEORY GmbH
Netseer
Neustar AdAdvisor
NEXD
Maytrics GmbH
NexTag
NextPerformance
Nielsen
NinthDecimal
Nugg.Ad
NTT DOCOMO, Inc
Nudge
O2 Telefonica
Okra Media
Omnivirt
On Device
Ooyala
OpenX Software Ltd. and its affiliates Optimise
ORU
OwnerIQ
Parship Greatviews
Pelmorex
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PIXIMEDIA SAS
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Quantcast International Limited
QuinStreet
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R-Advertising
Radium One
Rads Media
Rakuten Marketing LLC
Ram Panel
Real Media Group
Refined Labs
Research Now
Resonate
RevJet
Revtrax
Rich Relevance
Rich Media Studio
Rippll
The Rubicon Project, Limited
Sam4Mobile
Samba TV
Scene Stealer Limited
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Semasio
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SimpleReach
SiteScout
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Sketchfab
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So-Net Entertainment Taiwan SourceKnowledge (Sokno Media Inc)
Space
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SpotX
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Sublime Skinz
Survata
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Tail Target Audience & Insights Lab
Tapad, Inc.
Thunder (PaperG)
TNS
MercuryMedia
The Trade Desk, Inc and affiliated companies TradeDoubler
Trend Research
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Trueffect
TrustE (now TrustArc)
Tune
Turbo
Amobee, Inc.
Twiago
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Undertone
ValueClick (now Conversant)
Varick Media
Velti
ViewersLogic
Visible Measures
Visual IQ
Vivalu
 

Porsupah Ree

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The source is anonymous, but..

When Tumblr bans porn, who loses?

But a former staff engineer, who recently left Tumblr and asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons, tells Vox that the NSFW ban was “in the works for about six months as an official project,” adding that it was given additional resources and named “Project X” in September, shortly before it was announced to the rest of the company at an all-hands meeting. “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway,” the former engineer told me. “Verizon pushed it out the door after the child pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn.
 

Dakota Tebaldi

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The source is anonymous, but..

When Tumblr bans porn, who loses?
No this makes complete sense to me, because it's true. Nobody really wants to buy ads next to porn except for other porn. You'd think that as widely-consumed as porn is, that fact would make it an obvious and reliable place for ads of all kinds to get views - but the other half of the coin is that people in the midst of consuming porn aren't really going to be looking at ads that aren't porn either.

Internet porn comes with all kinds of weird problems. Another one is that artists who make adulty-topic work are cut off from important audience-interfaces like Patreon and they usually can't use transaction facilitators like PayPal either. Prudery by people running those services or threatening boycotts isn't that big a problem; the main thing is credit processing companies have gotten burned out by having to eat all the chargebacks, so by and large they no longer want anything to do with the adult online industry.
 

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Verizon's Tumbr policy change isn't a ban on porn, unless one conflates adult or "sensitive" content as pornography. Had it been limited to a ban on actual porn, their new policy would have been written(not to mention enacted) a lot differently. In US movie rating terms, a lot of pg-13 content is now forbidden.

The need to have safe, sterile, and status quo supporting content while pushing all others off is prudery(to be generous), even if it's ostensibly only for corporate profit motives. As if there isn't an awfully long historical context to go along with it here.
 
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Kara Spengler

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Also, BDSM stuff is usually automatically considered porn, even when its just a woman wearing a collar with a lollipop. Both of these things are frustrating as all get out, because its saying 'this stuff is automagically 'adult'
Which is just a hop away from when myself and others in the kid community were up in arms when the adult continent was rolled out in SL. Not that we had any interest in going there if we even were able to. That we could get meta about stuff like that and did not like what was going on.
 
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Robert Jung

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First I hit the "sgree" button because there is a group trying to create an alternative.
Then I actually bothered to click on Cris's link!
;)
 

Evola

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pillowfort and pixelfed both look promising, for next year anyways.
 
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If it isn't legit someone sure went to a lot of time and trouble typing.
 
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