Introducing: Community Labels

As you know, art and artists make Tumblr what it is. We want everyone on Tumblr to be able to fully express themselves while also having control over what they encounter on their dashboards. That’s why we’re introducing Community Labels, an extension to your “Content you see” settings. Our ultimate goal is to create a more open Tumblr, and this is our first step in that direction. 

As a poster and reblogger, Community Labels are your way to help your followers avoid anything they’d rather not come across on their dashboards.

As a follower, setting your content preferences is a way to adjust your feed to your own comfort levels. 

How does it work?

When creating new posts (or editing old posts), you’ll see controls allowing you to label your post as unsuitable for those filtering certain content types it contains. 

When content is labeled, it will either be hidden, blurred, or displayed normally, based on each user’s preferences.

In your “Content you see” settings, you can now choose to show, blur, or hide content that depicts the following topics:

• Drug and alcohol addiction: Contains discussions of substance abuse or addiction experience.
• Violence: Contains violent or graphic content similar to what you might see in an age-restricted movie.
• Sexual themes: Contains sexually suggestive subject matter, such as erotic writing or imagery.

Some examples of content that would require a community label:

• Fanart of your favorite ship engaging with each other in…a very private moment 
• Euphoria GIFs showing Rue’s substance abuse 
• A movie trailer depicting graphic war scenes 
• A graphic 50 Shades of Grey edit

This doesn’t change our content policies: spam, hate content, and porn bots are still not welcome in the community. It’s also still important that we abide by app store rules, which means we need to make sure that mature content is only accessible to people who are old enough and have opted in to view that type of content. More information about Community Labels is available in the Help Center.

This is an opportunity to work towards a richer, more nuanced Tumblr experience while making sure everyone who enjoys using Tumblr can do so safely. That future we mentioned above? We’re already moving towards it.

I was talking to my mom today and we got on the topic of how our upbringings and social environments were so vastly different. A lot of parents don’t understand that due to our sociopolitical circumstances, a lot of us carry a very wary nihilism and cynicism about us. My mother grew up in the wake of Vietnam, after which was a reasonably prosperous time. There were dark times, yes, but it was things that had happened while my mother, and most of her generation, were already grown.

Our generation was born into a war. One of my earliest memories was of 9/11. I was 4, so I didn’t understand at the time. I saw the footage, the collapse, the jumpers. 4 years old. And then the war started, or rather, picked up where it left off in the 90s. I can vaguely remember Bush’s “free speech zones”. Cages lined with barbed wire, often times people were locked in them by police. People were treated like zoo animals. The war, the attacks, suicide bombers. I thought it was normal because I’d never known anything else. I had never known peace. None of us had. Then the housing crash, the outsourcing, the foreclosures. In my hometown of Flint, MI, everyone worked at the general motors plants. The pay was good, until they began outsourcing. Plants closed, tens of thousands lost jobs. Flint had been in decline already but when the plants closed, it was over. We became an unsalvageable, polluted wasteland. Crumbling roads, burnt down houses, abandoned factories like ghosts along the sides of the highway. The water. We haven’t had clean water for years. We grew up poor, and so we learned to be happy without money. We learned to enjoy experience instead of material things. Baby boomers cant understand why no one in our generation wants a house, of course not, our hand had been burnt before, with the housing crash. Protests, riots, police gunning down children with no consequence. We’ve never known peace, so we’ve made our homes in the ashes of what came before us.

from the Royal Rebel backstory kid’s book:

Leia had trouble in classroom environments, and was clearly fidgety and had trouble paying attention:

She wasn’t good at making friends:

(note this screenshot cuts off the start of the sentence, which was “The last thing…”)

Leia honestly believed that not letting anyone see how much pain she was in after her planet blew up was necessary for the rebellion: 

Anyway this children’s book is a delight and you should all read it.

Some other great stuff it covers is that apparently Leia respects Mon Mothma so much she never questions her orders and always follows them (!!!!!!!) and the book fully attributes the size of the rebel fleet to Leia and the ship running missions she did as a teen.

Anyway, 10/10 would read and cry over this children’s book again.

Pulp sci-fi illustration by Italian artist, Aldo Di Gennaro (b. 1938).