NSFW art allowed: Tumblr to allow nudity again, but not explicit sex
For those who haven't been on the platform for years, yes, Tumblr still exists. And it's allowing nudity on the site again after previously banning adult content.
In its heyday, Tumblr welcomed NSFW content but started to ban it in 2018. On Nov. 2, the company announced an update to its community guidelines, once again opening the platform to nudes.
"We now welcome a broader range of expression, creativity, and art on Tumblr, including content depicting the human form (yes, that includes the naked human form)," the site's blog post read.
"We're not here to judge your art, we just ask that you add a Community Label to your mature content so that people can choose to filter it out of their Dashboard if they prefer."
Community Labels allow users to tag their content if it depicts drug and alcohol addiction, violence, or sexual themes. These kinds of posts will either be blurred, hidden, or displayed normally, based on each user's preferences.
However, Tumblr clarified that "visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits." Content with an "overt focus on genitalia" is also still forbidden.
Meanwhile, historically significant art like those you may find in a mainstream museum that depicts sex acts, such as India's Śuṅga Empire, are welcome on Tumblr.
In 2018, Tumblr banned adult content—from nudity to those showing "female-presenting nipples"—which caused the microblogging site to lose almost a third of its users. According to PinkNews, traffic fell from 521 million monthly page views in December to 437 million in January 2019. By February, the figures further dropped to 369 million page views.