Unsurprising to many, Tumblr’s prevalence for porn has been documented in a new report, which discovered nearly 50% of users end up seeing porn in their timeline on the site.
“Even though the vast majority of pornographic material is posted by a very small core of users, the adult content reaches a much wider audience, spreading through social ties,” explained the study, which focused on social network Tumblr and photo sharing site Flickr. “In Tumblr the spreading is wider also because the platform enables sharing actions (reblog) which are not present in Flickr. Moreover, although the consumption of deviant content remains a minority behavior, the average local perception of users is that neighboring nodes reblog more deviant content than they do.”
Despite the high-level of porn, the report also claims that “Tumblr is used predominantly by young females.”
“Based on a statistics over 1.7M Tumblr users who selfreported their demographic information, we estimate that the average user age is 26 and 72% of the users are female,” the study declared.
In a pie chart included in the study, it claims that 21.54% of users are “consumers” of adult content, while 28.46% are “unintentionally exposed” to it.
Just 0.10% of users actually posted the pornographic content, while 49.90% claimed not to be exposed to such material.
As noted by CNET, Tumblr requests users to not post porn videos and to tag sexual content as “NSFW.” However, unlike more censorship-happy social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, it currently has no enforced sanctions for those who disregard such rules.
“Tumblr is home to millions of readers and creators from a variety of locations, cultures, and backgrounds who hold different points of view concerning adult-oriented content,” states Tumblr on their community guidelines page. “If you regularly post sexual or adult-oriented content, respect the choices of people in our community who would rather not see such content by flagging your blog (which you can do on your blog’s Settings page) as Not Suitable for Work (‘NSFW’). This action doesn’t prevent you or your readers from using any of Tumblr’s social features, but rather screens your blog’s content from Tumblr users who would prefer not to see NSFW material.”
“You can embed anything in a Tumblr post as long as it’s lawful and follows our other guidelines, but please don’t use Tumblr’s Upload Video feature to upload sexually explicit video,” the company explains. “We’re not in the business of hosting adult-oriented videos (and it’s fucking expensive).”
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.
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