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While this may well be a factor in their decision, it seems highly unlikely to me that (a) Apple was entirely unaware porn existed on Tumblr for the years the a

While this may well be a factor in their decision, it seems highly unlikely to me that (a) Apple was entirely unaware porn existed on Tumblr for the years the app was in the store before November 2018, and (b) the only way Tumblr could ensure there was no child porn on their servers was to ban everything that smacks of NSFW-ness down to "female-presenting nipples." Tumblr's CEO said they've been considering this move for months, and I don't see any reason to doubt him. Tumblr has never made money, as far as I know, and Yahoo's new corporate parent Oath seems to be a lot less mellow about that sort of thing. I suspect this is a necessary step before they open the advertising floodgates and see if they can get Tumblr to start paying for itself. Losing a massive amount of their userbase is an acceptable outcome as long as there's still enough users there for more advertising to turn a a profit.

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
b might not be so insane if you consider that tumblr is used by a lot of people who posts selfies. That would include a lot of teens/tweens. The problem with selfies is that they wouldn't be in anything like photoDNA and thus impossible to catch by any of the modern day algorithms except for the ones designed to catch porn in general. They might not have any better solution (of course they would ban stuff as it was reported, but that might not be good enough) and apple's move forced their hand. Guess the question is what caused apple to do what it did now.