Tumblr’s porn ban ruined the best parts of the site

When porn performer Arabelle Raphael entered the adult industry over a decade ago, she found it difficult to find work because of her tattoos. “I didn’t fit the beauty standards of the porn industry back then,” she told Mashable.

Then, in 2010, she joined the microblog site Tumblr — and she found her audience. 

“I just…built everything, my following and everything like that by myself,” she said, “just running a Tumblr blog.”

For Raphael and many others, Tumblr was a place to express not just sexuality, but an “alternative” sexuality not popular in the mainstream at the time: tattooed porn, LGBTQ porn, and fetish porn, sometimes inspired by a beloved TV or movie. 

Prior to Tumblr’s “adult content” ban in 2018, a swift decision by the company to remove all sexually explicit posts, the site was a hub for sex workers, queer kids, and anyone else who wanted to display their sexual interests alongside different aspects of their personality. There was nowhere else on the internet like Tumblr — and, unfortunately, due to current and potential legislation, that’s likely to stay the case. 

The golden age of Tumblr porn

“There was a certain aesthetic” to Tumblr porn, explained sex worker and porn performer King Noire, who used Tumblr alongside his partner and fellow performer, Jet Setting Jasmine. 

The term “Tumblr porn” is sometimes akin to “pretty porn,” or explicit images with soft lighting and exquisite posing. While it’s possible to find such stylistic content elsewhere, it boomed on Tumblr.

“People actually put some time, energy, and effort into something beautiful that might have just been erotic art,” Noire continued. “Most people might not even label it ‘pornography.'” 

There was so much explicit content on Tumblr, pretty or not, that Noire didn’t know there was anything else on the social network. Indeed there was; Tumblr was home to much “SFW” art and writing, “aesthetic” content, regular ol’ shitposting, and fandom communities. The latter would oft delve in pornography themselves.

“I really associate Tumblr with fans and fandom,” said Maggie MacDonald, a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto researching pornography platforms. Tumblr was a place where people — especially queer teens — could view porn that wasn’t on what MacDonald called “straight sites” like Pornhub. This porn was, by contrast, more loving, more queer, or even just a bit “weirder.” 

The fans on Tumblr had the ability to make things erotic that were not initially intended to be erotic.

Porn often bled into Tumblr fandom communities. By, say, GIFing a glance between two characters (like the brothers on Supernatural), Tumblr users decontextualized moments and rendered them sensual. 

“The fans on Tumblr had the ability to make things erotic that were not initially intended to be erotic,” said MacDonald. “They sort of created their own porn. And that was really where the Tumblr fan community became pornographers themselves.”

GIF porn was a cornerstone on Tumblr overall, whether connected to television or not. Actual explicit videos were often turned into GIFs, too. 

“By snipping out super short moments and decontextualizing that from the rest of the piece, Tumblr porn — GIF porn — allowed fans to read into the grain of what the original porn was saying,” MacDonald explained. 

Seconds from a porn scene were extracted from their original states and rendered however the editor wanted: slower or faster, black and white or oversaturated. Sometimes, faceless porn GIFs served as fantasies of mainstream celebrities or characters.

GIFs weren’t the only way Tumblr fans expressed their porny love for their favorite “ships” (relationships); there was fanfiction, fan art, and photo edits compiled into “sets.” Fans queered a TV show that wasn’t canonically LGBTQ at all. They spoke eroticism into existence, MacDonald said — and they shared it with other fans.

This speaks to one reason why Tumblr porn was unique: It didn’t come from the top down, or from some webmaster. Tumblr porn was created and shared by the users. Rather than a commodity, porn on Tumblr (especially fandom-related porn) was a community effort.

I was able to build off of my personality as well as big boobs.

Furthermore, Tumblr had a seamless blend between porn and nonpornographic content. On one’s “dash” — dashboard or feed — X-rated porn GIFs and G-rated “squees” over a favorite couple existed in tandem. Sometimes, the two appeared on the same post.

“It was one of those spots where you can just show all the different sides of yourself,” Noire said of Tumblr, “and people who are looking for whatever your niche or whatever your style was, could then just gravitate towards it.”

MacDonald ventures that one of the reasons Tumblr was so successful pre-2018 was because it allowed its users to contain multitudes. With a single user identity, someone on Tumblr was able to discuss both their knitting hobby and, for instance, their love for furry porn. 

Raphael experienced the same thing: “I was able to build off of my personality as well as big boobs,” she joked. 

Pre-ban Tumblr didn’t divide one’s sexuality from their other interests — which is actually how our sexuality and attraction works, MacDonald said. You wouldn’t know it going online in 2022, but sexuality is just one social element in which we want to interact with others, like how we chat about our favorite TV show. Tumblr was one of the only, if not the only, social network that maintained that blend in our social lives.

Another imperative element to Tumblr’s success was the ability to create a persona, according to MacDonald. Unlike Facebook, you could be completely anonymous on Tumblr if you wanted; there wasn’t a need to share your school or connect with IRL friends. The anonymity allowed users to explore their sexuality — in fandom or otherwise — safely. 

At the same time, it was easy to make friends or enter a community. Through the ease of microblogging and sharing (“reblogging”) and the dash’s endless scroll, you constantly encountered and interacted with other users. Fans and artists flocked there because it was so easy to connect to others with similar interests. Tumblr was somehow anonymous, but social.

The demise of Tumblr (porn)

In November 2018, Apple removed Tumblr from its App Store due to the presence of child porn on the app; Tumblr said the content was immediately removed. The next month, however, Tumblr banned adult content entirely. 

Coincidentally, the bill FOSTA-SESTA, which attempts to stop people from assisting or facilitating online trafficking, was passed the same year. FOSTA-SESTA is anti-sex trafficking in theory, but in practice has only led to a single trafficker prosecution in its first three years, and has been cited as the reason tech giants push consenting online sex workers off their sites.

But the passing of FOSTA-SESTA in 2018 didn’t impact Tumblr’s decision to ban content. “The sole reason these changes are being made on our iOS app is to be more compliant with Apple’s App Store Guidelines related to content they classify as ‘objectionable,'” said Tumblr’s Director of Platform Engineering David Galbraith. 

The word “objectionable” appears in other tech companies’ terms as well, such as Facebook. According to MacDonald, the word itself is dangerously vague.

“It’s a very slippery slope, because ‘objectionable’ can apply to, like, a snuff film…but it can also just apply to almost anything sexual. But it doesn’t apply to all things sexual,” MacDonald explained. For instance, you can find misogynistic pick-up artist content online, and it will remain up because it’s apparently not “objectionable.”

Child porn is undoubtedly objectionable. The problem was, Tumblr made the sweeping decision to ban even of-age, consensual porn because of it.

Noire’s first reaction to the ban was, “Why is anyone else gonna go on Tumblr anymore?” He left the platform, and he wasn’t alone: Tumblr’s traffic dropped 30 percent in the months after the ban. Over the next three years, visits to the browser site and apps plummeted 40 percent.

Emma, a NSFW artist in the Netherlands who chose to go by their first name only for privacy reasons, told Mashable they lost about 70 percent of engagement after the ban. They witnessed not only a purge of adult content, but queer content as well.

“It was sad to see a platform be forced to ban a bunch of NSFW stuff because a lot of SFW stuff and queer content in general also got taken down,” Emma said. They left Tumblr a month after the ban due to the drop in activity.

Another NSFW artist, Aru, told Mashable that some of their SFW pieces were taken down post-ban. Tumblr never gave them a reason why, and it appeared random. Aru, who’s going by a pseudonym for privacy reasons, assumed it was because of their pink backgrounds, since similar pieces without pink backgrounds didn’t get flagged, even though they had scantily-clad characters. 

Raphael said it became obvious that Tumblr wasn’t going to be “a thing” anymore after the ban. She did briefly use the platform afterward, but was allegedly shadowbanned (when an account remains up but content is blocked from being seen); a Tumblr spokesperson denied that the site could shadowban pages.

She doesn’t miss Tumblr personally, and also acknowledged that many sex workers on Tumblr didn’t get paid. Still, she decried the ban. “It should be there,” Raphael said of Tumblr as a place for explicit content.

Tumblr employees felt the backlash, said Galbraith, and they themselves weren’t happy making a change that upset users. Even those who didn’t like adult content disagreed with the ban.

“It felt like a loss of control and antithetical to a core tenet of the Tumblr platform: freedom of expression,” Galbraith said.

Tumblr’s employees found out about the decision from then-CEO Jeff D’Onofrio, according to Galbraith. In 2021, D’Onofrio told The Atlantic that he was looking for a way to get NSFW content back on Tumblr — but then Tumblr removed innocuous-sounding tags (like #girl) to apparently comply with Apple’s guidelines yet again. D’Onofrio stepped down as Tumblr CEO weeks later in January 2022.

The ramifications of the Tumblr adult content ban

The loss of Tumblr porn — and, by extension, Tumblr itself — was devastating. Recently there’s been somewhat of a renaissance as Tumblr “became popular for being obsolete,” as The New Yorker put it. The site’s revenue went up 55 percent from July 2021 to January 2022, Tumblr told the magazine. Still, it’s a shell of what it once was. “People are posting there again, or at least I’m following more people who do post,” Aru said, “although it’s rarely NSFW and if it is it’s always cropped images with a hint to check out the artists’ Twitter for uncensored versions.”

According to Tumblr, there are currently 9.5 million daily posts; in 2012, there were 62 million daily posts.

“I used to be able to scroll for hours without getting to the end of my dash,” Aru said, “but I could now get through every single update within a few hours on the site.”

The ban was also a harbinger of the further purification of digital spaces. Since 2018, Instagram and Facebook have cracked down on sexual content, as did TikTok. OnlyFans, another platform that gained popularity with explicit content, banned it only to reverse their decision due to backlash. With MasterCard’s new regulations on explicit sites, these sites resort to mass deleting sex workers’ content in fear of being shut down completely.

“Sex workers set a whole lot of trends, and then are vilified and victimized by the apps…that built their following up on our styles or our followers,” Noire said. “As somebody who I’m sure brought some people to Tumblr, it’s always insulting when this happens.” 

As such, no place on the internet has replaced Tumblr. 

“It definitely became harder to find and connect with people who had similar experiences and interests as me,” Emma said of post-ban Tumblr. Now, they said those communities resort to hard-to-find Discord servers or Twitter.

Sex workers set a whole lot of trends, and then are vilified and victimized by the apps.

Twitter, which does still allow porn, is probably the closest we have to Tumblr, said MacDonald — but even there, sex workers like Noire say they’re shadowbanned. On Twitter, like Tumblr, users also have the ability to filter NSFW content from their feeds.

As of this publication, it’s unlikely there will ever be a true Tumblr replacement because of the current state of the internet. “The regulation of sexual media means that our pornography online has become ghettoized,” said MacDonald — both by legislation and the platforms themselves. 

Sex and porn have been largely pushed to the margins in online spaces, and the result is a clean break between our sexual and non-sexual selves. “The way that we consume pornography now is so broken off from the rest of our lives,” MacDonald said. “It’s singled out, is not integrated into our other interests, it’s not integrated into our sociality.”

This is exactly the antithesis of Tumblr at its apex: a place where people could be both sexual and non-sexual beings. 

Unfortunately, however, the outcome of FOSTA-SESTA could be repeated if the EARN IT Act, a surveillance bill, is passed. Like FOSTA-SESTA, EARN IT is anti-exploitation in theory, but could have ramifications for consenting sex workers and other marginalized groups. EARN IT would allow states to roll back online security features, which could lead to private companies scanning out content, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

EARN IT has the potential to squash healthy and safe sexual expression even more so than FOSTA, MacDonald said. If none of our data is encrypted — meaning that only the sender and sendee are able to see it — and private companies can scan it, that means that our private files and conversations can be regulated.

All the while, mega porn sites — the Pornhubs of the world — will be fine. This is true of sex online today: It’s allowed, but only from straight, white, and often rich and powerful creators. It’s sex workers and marginalized creators, the exact people that shined on Tumblr in its prime, that will hurt the most from these bills. 

The labor of love that Tumblr porn was may never exist again — but we hope it does. “The Tumblr porn community was really something that…defied the commodification of porn,” MacDonald said, “that we now see succeeding everywhere else.”