Tumblr Has No Idea How to Handle Porn
[There was a video here]
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is plowing through a media tour with her newly adopted internet son David Karp. On everyone's mind is how Tumblr will reconcile its vast collection of rape porn GIFs with tween-friendly advertising—and the duo doesn't have much of an answer.
In a sitdown with George Stephanopoulos, Karp—who earlier bristled at G-Step's insistence on labeling him a "hipster" for daring to wear a hoodie and be 26—got hit with the porn question. Of course.
"Are you worried that that is going to turn off advertisers?" (The answer is yes, they are worried)
So what will they do about it? As you can see, there's no real plan. The two have jargon on their side, but not specifics. Mayer suggests tagging NSFW posts as such could be a solution. But lots of the porn on Tumblr is already tagged with porny terms—tits, blowjob, etc. Mayer's quasi-answer sounds like it could segregate Tumblr into two sites—one with porn and one without—which users could toggle between. That sounds like a headache for anyone who enjoys porn! There are also plenty of Tumblr sites that punctuate generally SFW fare with NSFW media. What do you do with those?
"Uhh, community flagging, uhh, machine learning..." says Karp. Two surefire ways to not get rid of porn are hoping the porn-loving internet self-regulates, or that some sort of porn-sniffing algorithm can just handle it automatically. "Drawing a circle" around Tumblr's rape GIFs will be harder than just simply drawing a circle.