Tumblr has made and official statement on twitter about what’s going on:
We’re committed to helping build a safe online environment for all users, and we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to media featuring child sexual exploitation and abuse. As this is an industry-wide problem, we work collaboratively with our industry peers and partners like NCMEC to actively monitor content uploaded to the platform. Every image uploaded to Tumblr is scanned against an industry database of known child sexual abuse material, and images that are detected never reach the platform. A routine audit discovered content on our platform that had not yet been included in the industry database. We immediately removed this content. Content safeguards are a challenging aspect of operating scaled platforms. We’re continuously assessing further steps we can take to improve and there is no higher priority for our team.
Please please please, for the love of everything, stop spreading fear in our community. They are not purging your blogs for having NSFW content. If your blog gets deleted and you didn’t have any of the above mentioned content, or something that could be percived as such, then please contact Tumblr Support to regain your blog. They can be contacted via the form here.
Please reblog so people stop spreading false information and cause unnecesary fear.
………….we knew this shit was an issue that staff has been ignoring for ages but it finally came to bite them in the ass
hey general psa that in the notes theres a bunch of really stupid misinformation bullshit (as i should have expected) abt how this is a fandom thing, about fanart/fanfiction, and i would just like to clarify for as many people as i can that this is not a fandom thing at all, it is an issue targeting IRL minors.
minors have been running “sex work” blogs, selling private snapchats, et cetera, using tumblr as their platforms. there are also adult rings of CP (photographs and videos of IRL minors) distributors on tumblr that have managed to slip by filters. this is the issue being looked into by law enforcement, this is the issue being pursued by tumblr, and it is the reason the purge is being done so hastily and messily (protection of minors being sexually trafficked is generally more important than avoiding Jane Doe #193′s doctor who blog being nuked by accident). reporting fandom blogs to tumblr for written content and fanart is only going to confuse the matter further and make it more likely that minors will be put at greater risk (if fake reports come in massive quantities and drown out the real reports or make alarm fatigue likely).
As of today, November 17, 2018, any post with links, any links, even to other tumblr posts, just don’t show up anymore in tumblr’s search engine.
I just found out about it, after I posted a fic with a link to my masterlist and it got little to no notes (it shuldn’t). I was right – the moment I deleted the links, my post magically appeared in the search again. Wow.
do y’all remember before direct messages tumblr had a dumbass ask limit of 10 per hour and communication was impossible until they introduced dumbass fan mail and we were basically sending telegraphs back in forth trying to communicate those were…dark times
Do y’all remember when they finally gave us direct messages and instead of doing it normally, they gave it to a few people at a time and we had to infect each other with it like a virus
bullshit central 