Extremely handy if you follow a lot of people and hate missing anything good.
Best Stuff First moves the best stuff on your dashboard—mhm!—right up to the top.
It’s rolling out this week on iOS and Android, and comes with this Help Center article.
Thanks! ✌️
Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.
Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).
Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.
Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.
It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.
Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.
Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.
Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.
Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.
Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.
Jeff D’Onofrio
CEO
Hey Tumblr,
This past March, we made you aware of steps we took to take down an Internet Research Agency (IRA) disinformation campaign operating on Tumblr in the lead up to the 2016 U.S. elections. The IRA is a Russian state-sponsored group that attempts to influence global political sentiment using Tumblr and other platforms. Our efforts helped indict 13 people who worked for the IRA.
We said at the time that we would be on the lookout for additional evidence of fake Tumblr accounts affiliated with state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.
In the days leading up to November 6, 2018, we were provided information by law enforcement authorities, including a list of Tumblr accounts allegedly tied to the IRA. We immediately initiated our own independent investigation and we have now identified a total of 112 accounts that we believe to be IRA-affiliated. These accounts appear to be relics of past IRA activity. None of the blogs contained any content related to the 2018 midterm elections, and all of the blogs were dormant since the 2016 election cycle.
Although these blogs posed no threat to the 2018 elections, consistent with our promise in March, we:
U.S. intelligence officials and law enforcement continue to warn that we will see attempts at foreign influence in the future. We remain committed to closely monitoring for signs of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns and will continue to review any information made available to us.
There are also things you can do to help stop the spread of disinformation and propaganda.
Most importantly, we’ll continue to keep our promise to be transparent with you.
Hi Tumblr,
There’s some important information we want to share with you about a recent security bug we’ve resolved. Most importantly, there is no action required of you. We’ve resolved the issue, and have no evidence of this security bug being abused. We still, however, think it’s the right thing to do to let you know.
A few weeks ago, we received a report of a bug involving user account information from a security researcher participating in our bug bounty program, which invites some of the best researchers in the world to test the security of our systems. The bug was resolved by our engineering team within 12 hours of being reported to us, and we’ve taken steps to enhance product monitoring and analysis that will help prevent and detect this type of bug in the future.
The bug was in the “Recommended Blogs” feature on the desktop version of Tumblr. “Recommended Blogs” module displays a short, rotating list of blogs of other users that may be of interest, and appears only for logged-in users. If a blog appeared in the module, it was possible, using debugging software in a certain way, to view certain account information associated with the blog.
We’ve also thoroughly investigated any way in which our community could have been affected. We found no evidence that this bug was abused, and there is nothing to suggest that unprotected account information was accessed.
We’re not able to determine which specific accounts could have been affected by this bug, but our analysis has shown that the bug was rarely present. When it was, it was possible that certain user account information could have been viewed. This included email address, protected (hashed and salted) password of the Tumblr account, self-reported location (a no longer available feature), previously used email addresses, last login IP address, and the name of the blog associated with the account.
It’s our mission to provide a safe space for people to express themselves freely and form communities around things they love. We feel that this bug could have affected that experience. We want to be transparent with you about it. In our view, it’s simply the right thing to do.
Well, look at this.
P.S. We’re in good company. Congrats, @nasa!
