Nudity comes back to Tumblr, but sexually explicit images still banned

At a time when Musk is trying to make it more money by making it more difficult for users to post nude pics, the possibility that Tumblr could rise back up as a profitable social media giant simply by allowing some users to post nude pics again is something that has left many users naked

The recent announcement that it would no longer restrict content featuring nudity, mature subject matter, or sexual themes has many users threatening to abandon the service. It appears that the decision of Tumblr could cause some users to leave.

The New Yorker reported earlier this year that Tumblr was attracting a younger demographic than other social platforms. Some of the users who fled Tumblr when it banned adult content would be willing to come back if nudity is restored on the site.

When community labels were introduced in September, there was a hint that this change was on the way. Users can set preferences to limit their feeds. The next step is to allow a broader range of expression, creativity, and art on the site.

Users can now label content as "mature" or "sexual themes" if they don't want to see it, and they can adjust their feed if they don't want to see it.

Will nudity still be censored?

Problems with child sexual abuse materials resulted in Apple banning the app from its store. A blanket ban on adult content was issued by the site because it couldn't afford to lose Apple. According to Forbes, consumers of adult content made up 25% of Tumblr's users. The removal of the content caused a lot of protests, including top creators who complained that their posts were being deleted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented how difficult it was to remove posts that did not violate the adult content ban. At that time, Tumblr's filtering tool seemed incapable of judging which content didn't violate its ban, with a mocking #TooSexyForTumblr showing a wide range of wrongly restricted images.

The EFF's associate director of policy and activism, Katharine Trendacosta, told Ars that the new nudity and mature content on the site should not be taken lightly. According to the announcement, visual depictions of sexually explicit acts aren't allowed on the site.

It's hard for machines to learn context. The over reliance on technical filters to do the heavy lifting on a policy like that is not good.

According to Trendacosta, there is a chance that by taking away the blanket ban,tumblr could censor more users.

When you introduce any sort of complexity into your rules, and you rely on an automated tool, you're going to get even more failure. When the rule was to ban nudity that wasn't considered classical art, they had a lot of failures.

According to Trendacosta, there was an opportunity for the community to respond to the new content guidelines. She said that if users are allowed to post nudity, mature subject matter, and content with sexual themes, they should be aware that there will be mistakes. There should be a way for users to report mistakes when content is removed.

Users have asked for such a tool. One person asked the platform if it was aware of efforts to stamp down on nudity, worried that bad actors could use the platform to report nudity. According to Trendacosta, Tumblr is still a smaller platform than other social media sites where harassment campaigns are more common. The user who commented said that it hasn't historically been easy for users to complain about wrongly flagged content.

Ars asked if it was better positioned to filters content now than it was in the past.