Porn Is Becoming Taboo Again
Increasingly, porn is being pushed back into the shadows
Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr was generally considered one of the most porn-friendly social media platforms. It was a place where users could form communities around their shared love of hardcore GIFs and soft-core photos, where porn performers could set up their own mini-websites without fear of being kicked off the service for posting obscene content.
Earlier this month, all that came to an end. After over eleven years of tacitly — and sometimes actively — supporting the porn fans and porn creators using their platform, on December 17, 2018, Tumblr’s leadership announced that pornography would no longer be allowed on the platform.
For many, the move came as a shock; a betrayal of the anything-goes attitude that’s long been assumed to underpin the infrastructure of the internet. But Tumblr isn’t alone in its newfound aversion to adult content. The week before the company’s porn ban announcement, Starbucks announced plans to debut a porn filter on its in-store WiFi, and the United Kingdom has spent over a year working out the details of an age verification system that would require all would-be porn viewers to register with a database before accessing adult content.
The recent crackdowns on pornography…
