Copyright issues Tumblr has received criticism for copyright violations by participating bloggers; Tumblr's visual appeal has made it ideal for photoblogs that often include copyrighted works from others that are re-published without payment. Tumblr users can post unoriginal content by "Reblogging", a feature on Tumblr that allows users to re-post content taken from another blog onto their own blog with attribution. In addition to these copyright infringements, Tumblr has at times been weaponized by individuals seeking to raise DMCA notices against other sites. Investigative news site Project Brazen stated that, shortly after publishing a story on 10 October 2023, an account was created on Tumblr that republished the content of their story and backdated it to 8 October 2023, two days before their article came out. Following a copyright infringement complaint filed on legal archive Lumen and without checking the veracity of the source,
Google delisted the Project Brazen article. After learning of the complaint, Tumblr removed the account and its posts.
Security Tumblr has been forced to manage spam and security problems. For example, a chain letter scam in May 2011 affected 130,000 users. On December 3, 2012, Tumblr was attacked by a
cross-site scripting worm deployed by the
internet troll group
Gay Nigger Association of America. The message urged users to harm themselves and criticized blogging in general.
User interface changes In 2015, Tumblr faced criticism by users for changes to its reblog mechanisms. In July 2015, the system was modified so that users cannot remove or edit individual comments by other users when reblogging a post; existing comments can only be removed all at once. Tumblr staff argued that the change was intended to combat "misattribution", though this move was met by criticism from 'ask blogs' and "RP blogs', which often shortened long chains of reblogs between users to improve readability. In September 2015, Tumblr changed how threads of comments on reblogged posts are displayed; rather than a nested view with indentations for each post, all reblogs are now shown in a flat view, and user avatars were also added. The change was intended to improve the legibility of reblogs, especially on mobile platforms, and complements the inability to edit existing comments. Although some users had requested such a change to combat posts made illegible by extremely large numbers of comments on a reblogged post, the majority of users (even those who had requested such a change) criticized the new format.
The Verge was also critical of the changes, noting that it was cleaner, but made the site lose its "nostalgic charm".
Userbase behaviour While Tumblr's userbase has generally been received as accommodating people from a wide range of ideologies and identities, a common point of criticism is that attitudes from users on the site stifle discussion and discourse. In 2015, members of the
Steven Universe fandom on Tumblr drove a
fan artist to the point of
attempting suicide via bullying them over their work, which depicted characters from the series in their own style; the abuse stemmed from the artist's depiction of 'fat' characters as being thin. In 2018,
Kotaku reporter Gita Jackson described the site as a 'joyless black hole', citing how the website's design and functionality led to 'fandoms spinning out of control', as well as an environment that inhibited discussion and discourse.
Promotion of self-harm and suicide In February 2012, Tumblr banned blogs that promote or advocate suicide, self-harm and eating disorders (
pro-ana). The suicide of a British teenager, Tallulah Wilson, raised the issue of suicide and self-harm promotion on Tumblr as Wilson was reported to have maintained a self-harm blog on the site. A user on the site is reported to have sent Wilson an image of a
noose accompanied by the message: "here is your new necklace, try it on." In response to the Wilson case,
Maria Miller, the UK's minister for culture, media, and sport at the time, said that social media sites like Tumblr needed to remove "toxic" self-harm content. Searching terms like "depression", "anxiety", and "suicide" on Tumblr now brings up a
PSA page directing the user to resources like the
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline,
The Trevor Project, the
National Eating Disorders Association, and
RAINN, as well as an option to continue to the search results. There are concerns of some Tumblr posts glorifying suicide and depression among young people.
Politics In February 2018,
BuzzFeed published a report claiming that Tumblr was utilized as a distribution channel for Russian agents to influence American voting habits during the
2016 presidential election. Despite policies forbidding hate speech, Tumblr has been noted for hosting content from
Neo-Nazis and
white supremacists. In May 2020, Tumblr announced that it will remove reblogs of terminated hate speech posts, specifically Nazi and white supremacist content.
Censorship Several countries have blocked access to Tumblr because of pornography, religious extremism or LGBTQ content. These countries include China, Indonesia, Kazakhstan and Iran. In February 2016, the
Indonesian government temporarily blocked access to Tumblr within the country because the site hosted pages that carried pornography. The government shortly reversed its decision to block the site and said it had asked Tumblr to
self-censor its pornographic content.
Adult content ban In November 2018, Tumblr's
iOS app was removed by
Apple from its
App Store after illegal child pornography was found on the service. Tumblr stated that all images uploaded to the service are scanned against an industry database, but that a "routine audit" had revealed images that had not yet been added to the database. In the wake of the incident, a number of Tumblr blogs—particularly those dealing primarily in adult-tagged artwork such as erotica, as well as
art study and
anatomy resources—were also deleted, with affected users taking to other platforms (such as
Twitter) to warn others and complain about the deletions, as well as encourage users to back up their blog's contents. Tumblr subsequently removed the ability to disable "safe mode" from its Android app, In December 2018, about a month after it was banned, Tumblr's iOS app was restored to the App Store. In 2019,
Cosmopolitan wrote that Tumblr had been known for providing adult content that attracted women and catered for other under-served audiences.
Transphobia Tumblr and its users often spar about the application of the website's adult content ban allegedly being maliciously misused to target transgender people, especially transgender women. Repeated bans of black, transgender, as well as leftist political blogs removed alongside alleged legitimate propaganda accounts accused of election interference during the
2020 and
2024 US presidential elections have led affected communities to view Tumblr as an
anti-black,
transphobic,
rainbow capitalist, and
rightist website, though with a larger focus on its alleged history of transphobia.
January 2022 In January 2022, Tumblr came under fire as the Commission Law Enforcement Bureau began investigating the use of the website's adult content ban disproportionately targeting LGBTQ posts. This was quickly followed by a stipulation and order between the
New York City Commission on Human Rights (NYCCHR) and Tumblr titled Settlement of Complaint Tumblr Inc. v. NYCCHR in 2022 (Tumblr Nycchr Settlement). Highlights of the settlement include:
February 2024 In February 2024, Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg (under his alias,
photomatt) personally enforced and responded to the banning of the user
predstrogen (whom is often referred to as Rita) for her alleged death threats against the CEO, where she made a post stating the following: I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere. She later continued the thread: How long until death wishes against the CEO get me banned or flagged. Right now I'm pissed off enugh that I want to find out Mullenweg later suggested this was a request to be banned as a
martyr in a public response on Tumblr. The situation quickly devolved into an elaborate argument between the two users, ultimately culminating in a potentially illegal disclosure of Rita's private side-blog information by Mullenweg. This is often satirically referred to as the
Hammercar Incident or
Mullenweg Meltdown. Black and transgender users of the site have alleged that this is connected to a larger rightward movement on the site, including in Tumblr staff, despite Mullenweg and Tumblr staff's public disagreements. == Notable matters ==