Our Community Guidelines provide you with information about what kind of content is permitted on Tumblr. We use a mix of machine-learning classification and human moderation by our Trust & Safety team to classify posts that are adult. Computers are better than humans at scaling process—and we need them for that—but they’re not as good at making nuanced, contextual decisions. This is an evolving process for all of us, and we’re committed to getting this right.
That’s why we will always notify you if your content has been flagged as adult so that you have the opportunity to review it and take any additional action that may be needed.
Reviewing and appealing
If you upload content that gets flagged as adult, you’ll receive a notification in two places:
- On a banner on the flagged content.
- In an email with links to review your flagged posts.
When reviewing your flagged content, you’ll see a few different buttons:
- Selecting “Review” sends a request for your content to be reviewed for a classification appeal. It should only be used if you believe your post was incorrectly flagged. You can read more about what’s considered adult content here. These reviews are always conducted by real people—no robots here.
- Choosing “Dismiss” will bring you back to the list of your flagged content.
If you ask us to review your post for misclassification, we’ll send you an email once the review for appeal has been completed. You may also prefer to simply remove the adult content from your post. If so, just use the pencil icon to edit your post to remove any adult content and then proceed to request a review. You can also use the pencil icon to delete the post entirely.
Note that only the original poster of content will be notified if it gets flagged as adult and given the ability to appeal. Reblogs of flagged content are not appealable, but they will show up in your flagged content list.
Also, if content has already been reviewed by one of our trained experts, then it cannot be appealed, and will say so in the banner on the post.
Checking the status of your appeal
You can check the status of your appeal and review your flagged content at any time in the “Review flagged posts” section of your blog settings. Finding the “Review flagged posts” page in the app is easy, but you’ll need to be using iOS 12.2 or Android 12.3.1 or later:
- Open the account tab (the silhouette of a person).
- Tap the gear icon.
- Tap “Review flagged posts” to see your flagged content.
- If you have multiple secondary blogs, switch between them by tapping the dropdown in the upper left corner of the account tab.
More of a desktop web person?
- Go to the account tab by clicking into account settings (the silhouette of a person) at the top of the dashboard.
- Click the name of the blog you want to check on the right-hand side of the page.
- Select “Review flagged posts” to see all flagged content for that blog.
Blogs marked as explicit
In addition to having any flagged content removed, blogs that have been either self-flagged or flagged by us as “explicit” per our old policy (before December 17, 2018) will still be overlaid with a content filter when viewing these blogs directly. While some of the content on these blogs may now be in violation of our policies and will be actioned accordingly, the blog owners may choose to post content that is within our policies in the future, so we’d like to provide that option.
Users under 18 will still not be allowed to click through to see the content of these blogs. The avatars and headers for these blogs have also been reverted to the default settings.
You can check and see if your blog is marked as explicit per our old policy (before December 17, 2018) in your visibility settings. If your blog was incorrectly flagged as “explicit,” or if you have since removed the adult content, you can file an appeal at http://tumblr.com/support by following these steps:
- In "What's going on?" select "Blog incorrectly marked as explicit."
- In the box, provide a quick explanation of why you think your blog should be unflagged so we know what to look for.
- In "Relevant blog," select the blog we should be looking at.
- Confirm your email address is the one you used to register your account. This will also be the email address that we'll use if we need to contact you.