Send Nudes: Tumblr Reverses Mature Content Policy as Elon Musk’s Twitter Flirts With ‘Paywalled Video’ Feature

It’s been a rough year for big tech, what with all those plummeting stock prices and rising costs making people question whether they really need to pay for extra subscriptions. The big companies have to do what they can to survive, which is why it looks like both Tumblr and Elon Musk’s Twitter appear to be tapping into an always reliable well: nudity.

Tumblr, the micro-blogging site that looked like it might dominate the internet in the mid-2010s (spoiler alert: it didn’t), announced on Tuesday, Nov. 1, that it had reversed an infamous 2018 decision to censor all nudity on the platform. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported that one of Musk’s other new gambits to help the famously not-very-profitable Twitter raise some cash is a “paywalled video” feature that, sure, could be used for all sorts of things, but let’s be real here, it’d probably mostly be porn. 

The possible “paywalled video” feature at Twitter seems to have the markings of a classic Musk scheme: less CEO-savant maneuvering and more, “hey, look at OnlyFans, how can we get a piece of that action?” According to documents obtained by The Post, the “paywalled video” feature could hit Twitter within just a couple of weeks.

As it stands, the feature would allow users to post a video, then add a paywall to that video and chose a preset list of prices (Twitter would, of course, take a cut of the proceeds). Perhaps unsurprisingly, folks at Twitter have said the paywalled video feature poses several big risks “related to copyrighted content, creator/user trust issues, and legal compliance.” 

Such issues will be addressed in an internal review — but with the effort to roll out the feature as fast as possible, the team responsible for the review will reportedly only have three days to provide feedback. What could possibly go wrong with that? 

As for Tumblr, the change to its community guidelines is a major reversal of a policy that many tied to the platform’s downfall in the late 2010s. Back in 2013, Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr, which was wildly successful and featured a plethora of adult content; but it was an issue with child pornography that got Tumblr temporarily removed from the iOS App Store in 2018. Not long after, Tumblr banned all adult content, and one year later, it sold to WordPress owner Automatic for under $3 million. 

As Dazed noted, Tumblr appeared to start inching towards this reversal back in September, when it announced a “community labels” feature that allowed users to tag posts with sensitive issues, including sexual content. A new company announcement confirming the reversal read, “We now welcome a broader range of expression, creativity, and art on Tumblr, including content depicting the human form (yes, that includes the naked human form).”

There are still some caveats and restrictions, however, with Tumblr encouraging posters to tag content with “nudity, mature subject matter, or sexual themes” with the appropriate community label. More importantly, “visual depictions of sexually explicit acts” are still banned.