Tumblr has devised a way to thwart adult or NSFW content from showing up in its network despite the fact that it had promised its users that it has no plans to police porn-filled materials.
Though the company won’t actively scrutinize and police content while they ban users from nude or NSFW photos uploading at the same time, it has made some notable changes to how their users can search and view those contents.
The new changes revolve around how the company displays searchable blogs and posts through mobile devices. Blogs that are classified either as adult (strictly nude or adult-oriented material) or as NSFW (partial nudity or adult-content) will never appear in tag or search pages for unlogged users or those who have turned on their phone’s ‘Safe Mode’ button.
If a user is logged in to his Tumblr account and his ‘Safe Mode’ is turned off, he would be able to view NSFW blogs on tag and search pages. However, blogs that are categorized as “adult” don’t have third-party search engine indexing nor does it have Tumblr’s own indexed searching feature.
While this won’t certainly affect most users of the popular blog site, it will however make an impact on the searchability of certain kinds of content. Users that normally rely on hashtags when searching for blogs on a particular topic or fandom may end up finding the search unavailable if their blog has been tagged as adult or NSFW. It should be noted however that users who insist on following adult or NSFW blogs would still be able to view the content in their dashboards just as long as they remember disabling the ‘Safe Mode’ of their devices beforehand.
Tumblr has also made searches not possible for tags involving subdued terms such as ‘bisexual’ and ‘gay.’ Content that has such tags will still appear in the dashboard for those users who are following a specific blog forum but the exact tag page will be empty.
