Tumblr Toes the Censorship Line

Deciding whether or not to censor content is a tricky matter for publishers and platforms. Facebook is notoriously quick to censor content it deems inappropriate (like pictures of two men kissing or women breast-feeding). Now Tumblr is getting in on some censorship action.

Last week Tumblr announced its new censorship policy, which bans “self-harm blogs” that glorify eating disorders. This is tricky territory, of course.

“We are deeply committed to supporting and defending our users’ freedom of speech, but we do draw some limits,” Tumblr writes in a blog post. “As a company, we’ve decided that some specific kinds of content aren’t welcome on Tumblr.”

The company has posted a draft of this addition to its content policy but is also asking the Tumblr community for its input. Do you think this move to censor is appropriate when plenty of other negative/violent/inappropriate content (like fat-bashing posts and posts about outward violence) gets the green light, as Johanna de Silento points out in her Thought Catalog article? Leave your stance in the comments.

https://digiday.com/?p=7470

More in Media

Media Briefing: Publishers say a cookie-less future remains murky, overheard at the Digiday Publishing Summit

Publishers who attended the Digiday Publishing Summit opened up about their top challenges, concerns and curiosities during closed-door, anonymous town hall meetings.

Why Warner Bros. Discovery is leaning harder into YouTube and Threads to monetize and engage social audiences

WBD is seeing ad revenue growth from its YouTube channels and engagement on Threads surpass performance on X.

Amazon reveals updated smart devices and software powered by Alexa LLM

Powering all of Amazon’s hardware is an updated large language model, that could help connected devices actually be smarter.
https://digiday.com/media/tumblrs-new-censorship-policy/
digiday.com
CC-MAIN-2023-40
93904
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:XNSCVA577JVC3OMB2QXPMX4DWIKTGSEJ
<urn:uuid:851cd2e1-a22f-48b4-bab4-c3d75bac4159>
2023-09-21T19:48:27Z
192.0.66.72
text/html
sha1:KUOW474ODEUGQRAJBKGMN6F4EVKMRTAO
<urn:uuid:2900671f-8190-4d3b-92ee-46116d5a62ff>
https://digiday.com/media/tumblrs-new-censorship-policy/
response
<urn:uuid:fa151015-8e57-4d24-963b-18493380cb61>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-40
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September/October 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-30
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/