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Tumblr was removed from Apple’s App Store over child pornography issues
- Macuyiko 8y agoCan't say I'm surprised. Tumblr has been so full of (non child) pornographic and outright weird material that it was due to attract this sort of folk as well. It really detracts from the platform for the rest of us, who just want to use it as a micro-blogging platform sitting between Twitter and Medium (where strangely, Tumblr has been horrible in finding its position). Either Yahoo should clamp down and meanwhile give the platform a solid update -- otherwise they'll probably shut it down sometime in the future. I can image the cost of running it must be pretty high.
- plumsempy 8y agoI don't know about the user groups, but instead of outright shutting down because it couldn't be what it wanted to be, it should investigate and become what the users want it to be, if it is an amateur porn platform, so be it. It can do it while prohibiting child pornography. In general, Tumblr is pretty bad at its product, maybe it's a yahoo thing.
- macintux 8y ago> ...if it is an amateur porn platform, so be it. Copyright raises its ugly head here. Yahoo presumably can't legally encourage the outright IP theft that would entail.
- devwastaken 8y agoI don't agree with this slippery slope of pornography somehow leading to cp. Tumblr is an image hosting site, any and all image hosters are used to distribute that kind of content.
- freehunter 8y agoI don't think it's a "slippery slope of pornography somehow leading to cp" but rather once people realize that there is no moderation and no rules and no one will shut them down, it turns into the Wild West. If criminals learn that there are no police officers anymore, they know they can get away with committing any crimes without punishment. Since tumblr will host things other sites won't, eventually someone will push the envelope and if they don't get shut down it will get pushed further and further. It's not about "any porn -> child porn", it's a progressive furthering of what is/is not allowed, and once you learn everything is allowed and nothing is banned, child porn (and other illegal content) is an inevitability.
- Macuyiko 8y agoAgreed. I didn't want to infer that any porn leads to child porn (that would be ridiculous), but about oversight, which Tumblr lacks.
- Technetium_Hat 8y ago>this sort of folk You mean the teenagers (ie minors) posting pictures of themselves? You act as if Tumblr is attracting pedophiles, when it's really just failing to moderate the platform.
- FooHentai 8y agoFailure to moderate the platform is exactly what's led to Tumblr becoming a haven for pedos.
- Macuyiko 8y agoI got downvoted for this comment, but wanted to mention after the fact that today tumblr just announced they'd restrict adult content on their platform...
- helsinki 8y agoThere is crazy stuff sitting on Imgur, too.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoLink 404s.
- baud147258 8y agoWhat's the point of linking a crawler? Are there any particular insight regarding the crazy stuff in the code of the parser?
- msla 8y ago> There is crazy stuff sitting on Imgur, too. But none of it's accessible unless you have a direct URL, and even then the pornographic crazy stuff is taken down quickly. The Imgur front page is pretty sanitized.
- ceejayoz 8y agoWait until the review team discover Safari...
- greglindahl 8y agoIf you look at browser apps and search engine apps, they're rated 17+.
- ralusek 8y agoMy thoughts exactly. You can even just go to tumblr's website, surely.
- devwastaken 8y agoTumblr like any website with image content is liable to have illigal images on it. Apple removing it, but not removing imgur, reddit, or any other site as an app, is playing favorites and making excuses. Its difficult enough to have reliable, safe sites where arists can create, share in legal artistic pornography, but with Tumblr being forced to mass-wipe things they're deleting both sfw and nsfw content. Most likely based upon reports, which in Tumblr culture are typically fake. There should be grounds for suing apple in mistreating the market in this manner, as this is real loss of profits involved, but I doubt it would work. Either way Tumblr is gonna lose a good amount of it's userbase.
- dijit 8y ago>imgur, reddit, or any other site as an app Except for the fact that both reddit and imgur have quite heavy handed moderation in place. Mature content (even when marked) is often removed from imgur. Reddit will ban entire subreddits if NSFW content goes anywhere near legal questions.
- devwastaken 8y agoThat's largely false. Imgur has tons of porn on it, you typically just don't see it on the front page. Imgur is the place to host albums of porn in a convenient way. Tumblr wasn't allowing the cp. As the article says it was immedietely deleted. In what way is this different to reddit or imgur? I doubt either have better image recognition, if any at all.
- themagician 8y agoThe iOS Imgur app hides all the porn though. You can’t search for it on the iOS app either. The Tumblr app, on the other hand, was HOW you would view porn. If you tried to go a NSFW Tumblr in Safari it would ask you to log in, and then bounce you into the app.
- devwastaken 8y agoThe removal from the app store is supposedly over cp, not it's accessibility to nsfw. Imgur does not magically block porn, because it doesn't know what images are or aren't. Reddit relies upon NSFW tags, and afaik can still be enabled through website settings. On the topic of pornography access, Apple is incredibly immature about it. They have a fetish of trying to remove pornography access, which should be unacceptable.
- sascha_sl 8y agoThere really needs to be a FOSS model for detecting this stuff. As someone who got in trouble with the police hosting user generated content I've essentially stopped doing it entirely, although I'd want to. There are some services that you can funnel content through, but getting access to them is tricky and getting a hit adds some reporting and compliance requirements, not to mention I'd be piping all my users images straight though microsofts servers.
- mabbo 8y agoYou've got an interesting problem there: who hosts the training or comparison set for such an FOSS system?
- bertil 8y agoSpecialised police units.
- bertil 8y agoThere is: PhotoDNA. The name sounds neutral, by design, but don’t let it fool you: unless your boss explicitly tells you this is your project now, I’d recommend you stay far away. Well, I’m not sure it’s FOSS or anything like that: it’s maintained by the police (a weak assortment of the services that handle that in different countries) and it has a key feature: it’s a bloom/hash filter of sorts, i.e. you don’t need to open the image to make it work (because even opening the file would be illegal). It recognises photos similar to those already flagged (which are absolutely not free, open or available in any way for obvious reasons). A typical implementation is to move the flagged image in a dedicated folder with very strict access-control, keep really reliable traceability and send details to your local dedicated police team. Even access to the filters is tightly controlled too, because the wrong kind of people could use it to sift through a lot of images. Because it’s a fairly standard tool for any image hosting company, I’m surprised Tumblr has been shamed. Either they messed up their integration, or they ignored police requests. It’s odd.
- ballenf 8y ago
- salmonfamine 8y agoIf you've been on Tumblr recently, you'll know that it's a pretty hands-off place. You get the general sense that Yahoo! fired everyone who worked at Tumblr and now it's just running on a server somewhere.
- bgarbiak 8y agoOne commenter in the OP article pointed an interesting aspect of it: it's widely required, and considered totally feasible to preemptively filter pornography from the user uploaded stuff, and yet: even the giants like YouTube will fall under the burden of copyright filters demanded by EU. No wonder then that politics usually introduce laws related the Internet under the "safe the children" slogan. It really does changes the perception.
- christopherwxyz 8y agoHot dog or not hot dog?
- eridius 8y agoAn "is this child pornography" filter is a wildly different beast than "is this copyright infringement". The crucial difference is something either is or is not child pornography, regardless of context. But whether something is copyright infringement depends on a whole variety of factors, and the exact same content uploaded by two different people might be a violation in one case and not in the other.
- bgarbiak 8y agoOf course, child porn is easier to identify. For a human eye. Also, in case of Apple and their App Store it’s not only CP, it is all kind of NSFW content that has to be filtered out. And that can be nuanced. It appears that for now the filter mechanism is simple: the content is scanned against known database of bad stuff. So, a twist on a Content ID.
- alistproducer2 8y agoI'm always surprised that these web 2.0 sites don't pay people to surf and flag content. It doesn't take much google-fu to find all sorts of stuff on the clearnet that shouldn't be there. I understand that removing offending stuff from Google search itself is very difficult but the walled garden sites like tumblr are much easier as most of the offending stuff is usually linked together by repost and/or likes. Find one page doing something it shouldn't and follow the likes and reposts down the rabbit hole flagging and removing as you go along.
- css 8y agoIt doesn’t help that Tumblr had no way to flag posts on mobile (both mobile web and in-app). There was too much friction involved in sending a report which is unlike every other social network I use.
- alistproducer2 8y agoThere are a lot of weird quirks with Tumblr that I don't understand like how some pages will only open up in the dashboard.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoThose are marked as "private" if you view those blogs in an incognito window (not logged into Tumblr) it will tell you that the blog is private and you must log in to view the blog. That's entirely the user's decision to make their blog private to the public.
- eridius 8y agoIf true, this is probably why the app hasn't been restored to the store yet. Apple requires apps that show UGC to have a reporting mechanism. In fact, if your comment is accurate, I don't know why Tumblr was ever allowed on the App Store to begin with.
- fredley 8y ago1: Sign up to webtwopointoh.com as a content-remover 2: Add loads of unwanted material to webtwopointoh.com 3: 'Find' said unwanted material, claim bonus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
- exabrial 8y agoTo add a whataboutism, what about Snapchat?
- lostgame 8y agoTwo things: 1 ) I'm unfortunately not surprised. For my girlfriends and I, Tumblr was basically effectively a place to express our lesbian-ness and effectively collect 'tasteful' nudes. It wouldn't shock me in the least to find teenagers doing a similar thing, which, of course, would be illegal. While others are saying that Tumblr was sort of picked on unfairly here, I'd argue the percentage of NSFW content that's easily-accessible on Tumblr is, in my personal experience, much higher than that of many other social networks. 2 ) That folks are still using Tumblr is a surprise to me. It seems as though many of my friends and I had a mass exodus about 4-5 years ago.
- Tiktaalik 8y ago> It seems as though many of my friends and I had a mass exodus about 4-5 years ago. Seems common for platforms to wind down and for exoduses to occur, but I haven't heard of another tumblr-like. Where did people head off to?
- mooseburger 8y agoIs there really a point to being this strict about child pornography? I'm still uncomfortable with the implications of certain configurations of numbers being illegal, and it's unlikely these laws/bans protect any children, unless there are people who exclusively rape children to distribute the resulting images and videos, which seems dubious. I can understand individual sites taking down such images, but anything further seems like overreach.
- kstrauser 8y agoThe more restricted an item is, the more a few remaining loyalists will pay to obtain it. We've seen this play out a thousand times with drugs. I infer, then, that there's probably a small set of people making a mint by literally raping children to distribute the resulting images and videos. And I still think enforcement of these laws should be absolutely draconian. This isn't a victimless crime: real lives are being absolutely destroyed. It's not like legalizing weed where suddenly you have a lot of people using it openly and responsibly. There is no acceptable degree of child rape that we can tolerate in society. I'm 100% with you if we were talking about file sharing. I'm 100% opposed to you on this specific subject.
- excalibur 8y agoThe problem is that the definition of child pornography is fairly broad, and the laws make little to no distinction between the various categories within it. Draconian enforcement is great for the hardened criminals profiting from child rape, but it also leads to locking up teenagers for possessing photos of themselves.
- DuskStar 8y agoI think you're conflating "child pornography" with "child rape" here and that might not be entirely fair. Ignoring things like 17 year olds sexting, my view of CP is that it's evidence of a crime, but shouldn't be a crime, and certainly not at the level it is now. The biggest harm - the rape - has already occurred. Someone funding it is one thing - that's almost certainly conspiracy to commit that crime. But possession by someone completely unrelated to the act? Just like videos of people being graphically murdered, for instance. I'd put 3guys1hammer up with anything else on the internet in terms of "should not exist", but that doesn't mean I think it should be illegal to possess/distribute/view.
- ralusek 8y agoIs the OS responsible? The browser? The client application?
- bears_burger_42 8y agoUgh, I'm sure no one will really care about this comment but tumblr absolutely has a terrible child porn problem. I basically stopped using tumblr for porn because of how much nude, as well as non nude pictures of kids I've reported to tumblr. It's a big issue. It's also incredibly easy to find child porn on there and despite reporting it, it always seems to pop back up. I get that people will post shit regardless but it really seems like they don't try to do anything but delete the single blog that has been reported. This is a site that's based around people "liking" and "reblogging" content. It's insane to see a picture of some kid being exploited, see how many blogs have reblogged and/or liked the picture, and then see how tumblr doesn't even attempt to address these blogs that clearly are doing the same thing, clearly liking the same things, and clearly reblogging the same pictures as the reported blog. I've reported blogs for harm to minors well over 20 times. It's a drag.
- FooHentai 8y agoYes, agree. I left for the same reason. The irony is that the same mechanism that allows that content to propagate is also the perfect tool for eliminating it. Liked/reblogged the content? Banned.
- zapzupnz 8y agoI can't call myself too surprised considering that 'tumblr' and 'filtering' aren't so much strange bedfellows as perfect strangers. I mean, hell, apps geared towards sexual encounters do a better job of filtering content. Grindr, Tinder, etc. Meanwhile, tumblr is pretty much unfettered access to whatever you fancy, not necessarily able to be bound by iOS' own filtering options such as Parental Controls in an elegant way. Trouble is, if tumblr raised the app's minimum age to 17+ as with a lot of other apps with , that's a great deal of the app's userbase that can no longer access the service. On the other hand, heavily filtering content now means a huge backlog of content to sort through, with plenty of legitimate, if highly erotic, material ripe for getting falsely flagged as inappropriate. tumblr's in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, though one entirely of their own design.
- troyvoy88 8y agoSo first Gab now Tumblr. The only ones that remain and very likely will always remain untouched because they are standing in higher moral ground. The holy and all mighty lords and saviors Twitter and Facebook.