End of an Era. Tumblr to Ban Porn

Citing Apple's aversion to pornography, Tumblr from December 17 on, will delete all porn. Not only will that probably be the end of the photo sharing service, it also show just how influential tech and finance companies are.

I try to keep it tasteful. At least some of the time.

Google safe search is laughable. When it comes to adult images, it has none. A few years back Google also wanted to close down the adult section of Blogger. That would have meant bye bye 11Dutch.

Most people know what the glass ceiling is, but have you ever heard of the glass cliff? Basically it's where a woman is appointed CEO of a distressed company, one that is beyond salvation. In 2012 Marissa Mayer left Google to become CEO of Yahoo, a company of which nobody understood why it was still out there. About a year later Mayer acquired Tumblr for 1.1 billion, hoping it might turn around the parent company. It was considered a flagship acquisition, Mayer was later heavily critised for it. Four years on, Tumblr is part of a package of Yahoo core internet businesses that is being sold to Verizon. By then the micro blogging site is already in terminal decline.

This year, on December 17, Tumblr's new owners will ban all adult content from the photo sharing site, citing Apple's aversion to pornography on its platforms. Many people, including myself, believe the only raison d'etre for Tumblr is that it still allows adult content and that banning porn will be the end of it. If adult blogging is not your thing, there definitely are better options out there.

The story highlights three things. The first one is that mobile rules, although I don't really understand why Tumblr's new owners simply don't pull the app from the Apple store.

The second one is the outsize influence of a small group of tech and financial companies over what we can see and do. Fetlife, for example, has been struggling to find a payment processor and they are not the only one.

Finally this story shows how big companies are perfectly fine with almost everything online, think racism or hate speech. The only thing they object to, is naked people. The Washington Post has a fair point:

"Tumblr's nudity crackdown means pornography will be harder find on its platform than Nazi propaganda."

It makes no sense at all and is very dangerous. Democracy isn't perfect, but so far alternatives are worse. These days companies make the rules rather than democratically elected governments. Politicians may like it, risk free policy making and so on, but society - and our individual freedom - are on a slippery slope because of that.

It'll be interesting to see if Twitter follows suit any time soon.

---

Note: Yesterday Tom Allen's Edge of Vanilla also wrote about Tumblr's adult era coming to an end.