Tumblr boss says the internet has fundamentally changed its stance on pornography

The internet has fundamentally change its stance on pornography, the head of Tumblr has said.

Matt Mullenweg, the chief executive of Tumblr parent company Automattic said that the “casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible” as he looked to explain why Tumblr and other sites will never go back to freely available adult content.

Tumblr was once known for lax attitudes towards pornography that helped make it one of the most popular sites on the internet. But in 2018, new owner Verizon banned such content, introducing restrictive rules that kept it off the platform.

Since then, many users have asked the site to go back to the rules it had in its earlier days. But despite a new owner at Tumblr and other changes, Mr Mullenweg said that he would not be able to institute those rules even if he wanted to.

“No modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007,” he said. He said that he was “personally extremely libertarian” in what should be available on the site, and that he agreed with Tumblr’s old policy of “go nuts, show nuts”, but that it would be impossible to institute now.

He pointed to a variety of difficulties: financial companies refusing to process payments on adult websites, app platforms such as Apple’s App Store that have bans on what content is available, rules around verifying consent and age of people depicted in pornography, and the inability of such companies to get investment.

Taken together, those rules would make it impossible for Tumblr to revert to its old rules, he said. He also suggested that it would be similarly impossible for any other site to launch that had a similarly permissive approach to the old version of Tumblr.

“If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money,” Mr Mullenweg wrote.

He estimated that such a business would have to make at least $7 million each year for every million daily active users to be able to fund such a plan.

Mr Mullenweg did however say that he hoped that “a dedicated service or company is started that will replace what people used to get from porn on Tumblr”. He called on users to “try to change the regimes” that make it so difficult, rather than attacking companies for “following legal and business realities as they exist”.