Tumblr Is Allowing Nudity Back

However, creators like Kate who use social media to drive an audience to their paid content on OnlyFans or other sites aren’t sure they’ll make the move away from Twitter. “I started focusing more on Twitter a little before the porn ban happened, just because there were more people on Twitter,” she told BuzzFeed News. “I miss Tumblr (and I don’t like Elon), so my hope is that maybe there won’t be such a big difference in the size of their user bases in the future.”

The 2018 porn ban came as Tumblr, owned by Verizon at the time, was struggling to avoid being removed from Apple’s App Store over child sexual abuse images. The initial wording of the ban described rejecting “female-presenting nipples,” language that was, of course, roasted by Tumblr’s users. Tumblr had been a haven for nudity and porn (for better and worse), so naturally, users were pissed. Less than a year after the porn ban, Tumblr was sold to Automattic, the company best known for the blogging platform WordPress.

In a Tuesday post on Tumblr, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg described several business and technical hurdles to having porn on the platform, like processing payments and keeping Tumblr in the App Store. “I am personally extremely libertarian in terms of what consenting adults should be able to share, and I agree with ‘go nuts, show nuts’ in principle,” he wrote, “but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible.”