Tumblr allows nudity but not explicit sex. The rest of this post goes into detail about that, but I just wanted to be clear right from the start that explicit sex is absolutely not allowed on Tumblr.

“We’re not here to judge your art, we just ask that you add a Community Label to your mature content,” the updated guidelines say.

In a company announcement on Tuesday, Tumblr staff wrote: “We now welcome a broader range of expression, creativity, and art on Tumblr, including content depicting the human form (yes, that includes the naked human form).”

This change follows the platform’s announcement of a new “community labels” feature in September that allows users to tag their own posts that feature depictions of drug and alcohol addiction, violence, and sexual content.

After a staff member reblogged the community labels announcement, writing, “Ok, didn’t everyone want ‘females presenting nipples’ back on Tumblr? Here you are. This is it,” people briefly thought this meant the return of all nudity on the platform. Now it seems that the labels were a precursor to this change in guidelines, making it easier for people to tag NSFW content as such.

Tumblr stopped allowing pornography in 2018 after the Tumblr app was temporarily removed from the iOS App Store because child pornography passed through the app’s filtering technology. Since then, its web traffic has dropped by around 30% and has largely stagnated. Still, like many web services, certain kinds of sexual content are allowed on Tumblr, even after the platform’s fateful porn ban — this includes content with nudity that serves an “artistic, educational, newsworthy or political” purpose (yes, those guidelines are intentionally vague). As many users have joked about, Tumblr does not allow images, videos, or GIFs of genitals or… “female-presenting nipples.”

“So to be clear, is erotic fanart now allowed back on Tumblr so long as you classify the post appropriately?” another user asked. The Tumblr staff member replied, “Yes.” But, as it turns out, the employee was mistaken.

So, basically, one person at Tumblr said “female-presenting nipples,” and the rest of the site erupted into a fit of horny triumph. In actuality, the community guidelines did not change at all.

“I probably should have shut up yesterday because people saw someone from Staff saying ‘tits’ and started to take it as a confirmation of all kinds of things, but I literally wasn’t in any position to confirm or deny anything,” the staff member later wrote on their blog.

It’s still up in the air whether or not these community labels may eventually allow users to post a wider range of content. In the announcement itself, Tumblr said that content like “fanart of your favorite ship engaging with each other in…a very private moment” would be assigned a community label. Naturally, this confused some users who had not been allowed to post such content.

Be sure and follow Fleshbot (@fleshbot) on Twitter to keep up with all the latest news!