Introducing: Community Labels
As you know, art and artists make Tumblr what it is. We want everyone on Tumblr to be able to fully express themselves while also having control over what they encounter on their dashboards. That’s why we’re introducing Community Labels, an extension to your “Content you see” settings. Our ultimate goal is to create a more open Tumblr, and this is our first step in that direction.
As a poster and reblogger, Community Labels are your way to help your followers avoid anything they’d rather not come across on their dashboards.
As a follower, setting your content preferences is a way to adjust your feed to your own comfort levels.
How does it work?
When creating new posts (or editing old posts), you’ll see controls allowing you to label your post as unsuitable for those filtering certain content types it contains.
When content is labeled, it will either be hidden, blurred, or displayed normally, based on each user’s preferences.
In your “Content you see” settings, you can now choose to show, blur, or hide content that depicts the following topics:
- Drug and alcohol addiction: Contains discussions of substance abuse or addiction experience.
- Violence: Contains violent or graphic content similar to what you might see in an age-restricted movie.
- Sexual themes: Contains sexually suggestive subject matter, such as erotic writing or imagery.
Some examples of content that would require a community label:
- Fanart of your favorite ship engaging with each other in…a very private moment
- Euphoria GIFs showing Rue’s substance abuse
- A movie trailer depicting graphic war scenes
- A graphic 50 Shades of Grey edit
This doesn’t change our content policies: spam, hate content, and porn bots are still not welcome in the community. It’s also still important that we abide by app store rules, which means we need to make sure that mature content is only accessible to people who are old enough and have opted in to view that type of content. More information about Community Labels is available in the Help Center.
This is an opportunity to work towards a richer, more nuanced Tumblr experience while making sure everyone who enjoys using Tumblr can do so safely. That future we mentioned above? We’re already moving towards it.
Community labels are our first step toward making sure that everything is appropriately tagged on Tumblr so that people aren’t exposed to content they don’t want to see or aren’t legally allowed to see. The response has been great so far, and I’m very excited that a fuller range of artists will be able to appropriately tag and protect their art and work. App store policies, particularly Apple’s, still mean that we need to take extra steps to make sure that anything tagged isn’t available to younger users and you need to explicitly opt-in to make sure it shows up. (That’s why we’re collecting birthdays now.) We haven’t updated the official content policies yet but hope to bring them more in line with our policies on WordPress.com soon.