A former staff engineer, who recently left Tumblr and asked to remain
anonymous for professional reasons, tells Vox that the NSFW ban was “in
the works for about six months as an official project,” adding that it
was given additional resources and named “Project X” in September,
shortly before it was announced to the rest of the company at an
all-hands meeting. “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway,” the
former engineer told me. “Verizon pushed it out the door after the child
pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem
was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn.Porn on Tumblr is something Verizon needs to wipe out if it’s going to
make any money off what it thinks is actually valuable about the
platform — enormous fandom and social justice communities that, just
before the Verizon acquisition, Khalaf was insisting the staff figure
out how to better monetize.On that note-
Two former Tumblr employees said they were alarmed when Khalaf chose
Black Lives Matter as an example of a community that the company should
focus on converting into Yahoo media consumers. One told The Verge,
“Simon explicitly said that Black Lives Matter was an opportunity to
[make] a ton of money.”Capitalism is disgusting and ruins everything.
Solidarity with sex workers now. They can’t monetize fandom and social justice communities if we refuse to allow them to target only sex workers. People will die when this goes through and it is our responsibility to make sure that we practice solidarity while we still can.
Create and post adult content. Reblog adult content from sex workers. Avoid reblog stolen porn. Give your followers a heads up but make your blog adult-only until this either blows over or you are banned.
People’s lives are at stake here.
When Tumblr bans porn, who loses?
Published
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