If you've been on Tumblr recently, you'll know that it's a pretty hands-off place. You get the general sense that Yahoo! fired everyone who worked at Tumblr and now it's just running on a server somewhere.
Ugh, I'm sure no one will really care about this comment but tumblr absolutely has a terrible child porn problem.
I basically stopped using tumblr for porn because of how much nude, as well as non nude pictures of kids I've reported to tumblr.
It's a big issue. It's also incredibly easy to find child porn on there and despite reporting it, it always seems to pop back up.
I get that people will post shit regardless but it really seems like they don't try to do anything but delete the single blog that has been reported.
This is a site that's based around people "liking" and "reblogging" content. It's insane to see a picture of some kid being exploited, see how many blogs have reblogged and/or liked the picture, and then see how tumblr doesn't even attempt to address these blogs that clearly are doing the same thing, clearly liking the same things, and clearly reblogging the same pictures as the reported blog.
I've reported blogs for harm to minors well over 20 times. It's a drag.
Two things:
1 ) I'm unfortunately not surprised. For my girlfriends and I, Tumblr was basically effectively a place to express our lesbian-ness and effectively collect 'tasteful' nudes.
It wouldn't shock me in the least to find teenagers doing a similar thing, which, of course, would be illegal.
While others are saying that Tumblr was sort of picked on unfairly here, I'd argue the percentage of NSFW content that's easily-accessible on Tumblr is, in my personal experience, much higher than that of many other social networks.
2 ) That folks are still using Tumblr is a surprise to me. It seems as though many of my friends and I had a mass exodus about 4-5 years ago.
I can't call myself too surprised considering that 'tumblr' and 'filtering' aren't so much strange bedfellows as perfect strangers.
I mean, hell, apps geared towards sexual encounters do a better job of filtering content. Grindr, Tinder, etc. Meanwhile, tumblr is pretty much unfettered access to whatever you fancy, not necessarily able to be bound by iOS' own filtering options such as Parental Controls in an elegant way.
Trouble is, if tumblr raised the app's minimum age to 17+ as with a lot of other apps with , that's a great deal of the app's userbase that can no longer access the service. On the other hand, heavily filtering content now means a huge backlog of content to sort through, with plenty of legitimate, if highly erotic, material ripe for getting falsely flagged as inappropriate.
tumblr's in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, though one entirely of their own design.
I'm always surprised that these web 2.0 sites don't pay people to surf and flag content. It doesn't take much google-fu to find all sorts of stuff on the clearnet that shouldn't be there. I understand that removing offending stuff from Google search itself is very difficult but the walled garden sites like tumblr are much easier as most of the offending stuff is usually linked together by repost and/or likes. Find one page doing something it shouldn't and follow the likes and reposts down the rabbit hole flagging and removing as you go along.
One commenter in the OP article pointed an interesting aspect of it: it's widely required, and considered totally feasible to preemptively filter pornography from the user uploaded stuff, and yet: even the giants like YouTube will fall under the burden of copyright filters demanded by EU.
No wonder then that politics usually introduce laws related the Internet under the "safe the children" slogan. It really does changes the perception.
There really needs to be a FOSS model for detecting this stuff. As someone who got in trouble with the police hosting user generated content I've essentially stopped doing it entirely, although I'd want to.
There are some services that you can funnel content through, but getting access to them is tricky and getting a hit adds some reporting and compliance requirements, not to mention I'd be piping all my users images straight though microsofts servers.
Is there really a point to being this strict about child pornography? I'm still uncomfortable with the implications of certain configurations of numbers being illegal, and it's unlikely these laws/bans protect any children, unless there are people who exclusively rape children to distribute the resulting images and videos, which seems dubious.
I can understand individual sites taking down such images, but anything further seems like overreach.
Wait until the review team discover Safari...
There is crazy stuff sitting on Imgur, too.
Can't say I'm surprised. Tumblr has been so full of (non child) pornographic and outright weird material that it was due to attract this sort of folk as well. It really detracts from the platform for the rest of us, who just want to use it as a micro-blogging platform sitting between Twitter and Medium (where strangely, Tumblr has been horrible in finding its position).
Either Yahoo should clamp down and meanwhile give the platform a solid update -- otherwise they'll probably shut it down sometime in the future. I can image the cost of running it must be pretty high.
Is the OS responsible? The browser? The client application?
So first Gab now Tumblr. The only ones that remain and very likely will always remain untouched because they are standing in higher moral ground. The holy and all mighty lords and saviors Twitter and Facebook.
To add a whataboutism, what about Snapchat?
Tumblr like any website with image content is liable to have illigal images on it. Apple removing it, but not removing imgur, reddit, or any other site as an app, is playing favorites and making excuses.
Its difficult enough to have reliable, safe sites where arists can create, share in legal artistic pornography, but with Tumblr being forced to mass-wipe things they're deleting both sfw and nsfw content. Most likely based upon reports, which in Tumblr culture are typically fake.
There should be grounds for suing apple in mistreating the market in this manner, as this is real loss of profits involved, but I doubt it would work. Either way Tumblr is gonna lose a good amount of it's userbase.