Congrats, Horny People, Nudity Is Back On Tumblr

Tumblr announced that it will allow nudity back on its platform — just not “explicit sex.” This ends a torturous four-year boob-and-butt drought for the platform, which banned adult content back in 2018.

Tumblr’s new community guidelines state, “Nudity and other kinds of adult material are generally welcome. 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.”

However, “visual depictions of sexually explicit acts (or content with an overt focus on genitalia)” are still forbidden, with a carveout for historically significant works of art. Or, uh, whatever this is:

The ballyhooed return of boobs, butts, and other parts was widely celebrated on Tumblr as well as Twitter. Some saw this as a good reason for people frustrated with Twitter under Elon Musk to migrate back to Tumblr.

Twitter has always allowed nudity and porn, but the Washington Post reported this week that the site is now considering paywalling some video content. That means adult creators could have a way to make money through Twitter instead of just using the platform to promote their OnlyFans or other accounts.

The new Tumblr rules that differentiate nudity from sexually explicit content are already causing confusion. One adult content creator who goes by Boring Kate tweeted that a video of hers that’s in a gray area was taken down.

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.”