Tumblr’s chief David Karp addressed today the issue surrounding the blogging platform’s porn policy. In a post, he chalked up the confusion people were having around its policy as a result of the service’s complicated features. And while he sought to set the record straight, Karp said that there hasn’t been any “recent changes to Tumblr’s treatment of NSFW content, and our view of the topic hasn’t changed.”
The Yahoo-owned company recently came under fire when it was revealed that it had unlisted some porn blogs on its platform from being found. In an appearance on the Comedy Central network show The Colbert Report, Karp made an appearance and addressed the issue: “Look, we’ve taken a pretty hard line on freedom of speech, supporting our users, creation, whatever that looks like, and it’s just not something that we want to police.”
Now Karp has taken to the company’s blog to fire off a much larger missive to address critics of Tumblr’s actions. In his piece, he addressed three specific things, including the fact that the company has now fixed a bug within the Safe Mode setting, which apparently had prevented search results from all sites to appear when it was disabled.
When it comes to searching for NSFW/adult content blogs, Karp says that search terms are blocked because “different app environments have different requirements.” He says that’s the reason why #gay is blocked on certain platforms, but adult content still gets passed through. One solution is the introduction of more intelligent filtering, which Karp admits his team is working “diligently” on.
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On the topic of delisting blogs, Karp says that this was action the company took to prevent “not-so-nice” people from using the service as a place to host spammy commercial blogs. He claims that it’s a tiny subset of blogs that have been affected, but that it was never meant to be an “opt-in” flag. For those that have been affected and have anything “too sexy” for the workplace, checking off the “Flag this blog as NSFW” will prevent those in Safe Mode from viewing it. However, the blog will continue to be indexed by search engines.
Aside from all of his explanations, Karp says that Tumblr has not made any changes in how it treats NSFW content and that it hasn’t affected the way the company views the content.
Photo credit: Andrew Burton/Getty Images
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