In an interview shortly after the acquisition, Karp doubled down on the platform’s openness to porn. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer disagreed, arguing that targeting tools would keep content that isn’t “brand-safe” (read: porn) away from ads. When Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013, critics warned that premium advertisers wouldn’t exactly be clamoring to run ads in a sea of porn. Drew’s personal blog, which she had relied on as a public-facing way to tease the content available to her Patreon subscribers, was lit up with notifications from Tumblr informing her that most of her posts violated the new rules. Her usual feed, perfectly curated after nearly a decade of tinkering, was awash with panicked posts from fellow adult models, memes about the policy change, and goodbye posts.
When Melissa Drew, an adult content creator and model, logged in to Tumblr Monday afternoon, she was greeted by a deluge of unfamiliar posts and notifications. It’s about the companies and institutions who wield influence over what does and doesn’t appear online.
But Tumblr’s porn ban isn’t about porn or Tumblr at all, really. In the hours after the announcement, sex workers panicked, users threatened to leave, and-in classic Tumblr fashion-online petitions calling for change gained hundreds of thousands of signatures. On Monday, to the shock of the millions of users who had used the microblogging site to consume and share porn GIFs, images, and videos, Tumblr banned the “adult content” that its CEO, David Karp, had defended five years prior.
TUMBLR WAS NEVERexplicitly a space for porn, but, like most things on the internet, it is chock full of it anyway.
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