Digiday Publishing Summit

Connect with execs from Axios, The New York Times, Paramount and more.

VIEW PASSES

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.

More in Media

Media Briefing: Declared ‘good bots,’ mixed-use crawlers, gray scrapers – how AI accesses publisher content

The Cloudflare’s latest AI settings reshape how compliant crawlers behave, yet the biggest leakage for publisher content remains a gray scraping economy that doesn’t bother to play by those rules.

In Graphic Detail: The state of streaming highlights the power of creators

“Just Chatting” is the driving force behind views on major streaming platforms, thanks to the appeal of personality-driven creators

Hot Ones creator Sean Evans on YouTube vs. TV, the interview boom and what comes next

Hot Ones host and TIME 100 top creator Sean Evans chats about the creator economy’s past, present, and future