Added by Angelina Bouc on July 20, 2013.
Saved under Lina Bouc, Technology
Earlier this year, after Yahoo acquired Tumblr in a $1 billion deal, the social media starlet stated it would make no changes to the way people can access porn. That seemingly has now changed as users are stating posts flagged as adult are now censored from the website search. Mobile users state some porn tags are eliminated completely from their mobile devices.
The change in itself shouldn’t surprise anyone, after all Yahoo is looking to expand its ability to promote advertising spots. Advertisers are leery of making deals with an outlet that connects itself so highly to ‘Not Safe For Work’ (NSFW) results. Tumblr released a statement on its site yesterday stating,
All, we’ve heard from a bunch of you who are concerned about Tumblr censoring NSFW/adult content. While there seems to be a lot of misinformation flying around, most of the confusion seems to stem from our complicated flagging/filtering features. Let me clear up (and fix) a few things:
1. Last year, we added “Safe Mode” which lets you filter out NSFW content from tag and search pages. This is enabled by default for new users and can be toggled in your Dashboard Settings. As some of you have pointed out, disabling Safe Mode still wasn’t allowing search results from all blogs to appear. This has been fixed.
2. Some search terms are blocked (returning no results) in some of our mobile apps. Unfortunately, different app environments have different requirements that we do our best to adhere to. The reason you see innocent tags like #gay being blocked on certain platforms is that they are still frequently returning adult content which our entire app was close to being banned for. The solution is more intelligent filtering which our team is working diligently on. We’ll get there soon. In the meantime, you can browse #lgbtq — which is moderated by our community editors — in all of Tumblr’s mobile apps. You can also see unfiltered search results on tumblr.com using your mobile web browser.
3. Earlier this year, in an effort to discourage some not-so-nice people from using Tumblr as free hosting for spammy commercial porn sites, we started delisting this tiny subset of blogs from search engines like Google. This was never intended to be an opt-in flag, but for some reason could be enabled after checking off NSFW
Saved under Lina Bouc, Technology
Earlier this year, after Yahoo acquired Tumblr in a $1 billion deal, the social media starlet stated it would make no changes to the way people can access porn. That seemingly has now changed as users are stating posts flagged as adult are now censored from the website search. Mobile users state some porn tags are eliminated completely from their mobile devices.
The change in itself shouldn’t surprise anyone, after all Yahoo is looking to expand its ability to promote advertising spots. Advertisers are leery of making deals with an outlet that connects itself so highly to ‘Not Safe For Work’ (NSFW) results. Tumblr released a statement on its site yesterday stating,
All, we’ve heard from a bunch of you who are concerned about Tumblr censoring NSFW/adult content. While there seems to be a lot of misinformation flying around, most of the confusion seems to stem from our complicated flagging/filtering features. Let me clear up (and fix) a few things:
1. Last year, we added “Safe Mode” which lets you filter out NSFW content from tag and search pages. This is enabled by default for new users and can be toggled in your Dashboard Settings. As some of you have pointed out, disabling Safe Mode still wasn’t allowing search results from all blogs to appear. This has been fixed.
2. Some search terms are blocked (returning no results) in some of our mobile apps. Unfortunately, different app environments have different requirements that we do our best to adhere to. The reason you see innocent tags like #gay being blocked on certain platforms is that they are still frequently returning adult content which our entire app was close to being banned for. The solution is more intelligent filtering which our team is working diligently on. We’ll get there soon. In the meantime, you can browse #lgbtq — which is moderated by our community editors — in all of Tumblr’s mobile apps. You can also see unfiltered search results on tumblr.com using your mobile web browser.
3. Earlier this year, in an effort to discourage some not-so-nice people from using Tumblr as free hosting for spammy commercial porn sites, we started delisting this tiny subset of blogs from search engines like Google. This was never intended to be an opt-in flag, but for some reason could be enabled after checking off NSFW