San Francisco, Dec 29 Social networking site Tumblr has come with an update for iOS users that censors a long list of tags to comply with Apple's strict safety guidelines.
According to The Verge, the platform explains that it is changing iOS users' ability to access sensitive content, affecting their experience when it comes to searching for content, scrolling through the "Stuff for You" and "Following" sections of the dashboard and could even prevent access to blogs that are flagged.
The platform said it has to "extend the definition of what sensitive content is" to "remain available within Apple's App Store," and it seems that Tumblr stretched it pretty far.
Tags are what make posts searchable on Tumblr; posts with censored tags won't appear on a users' dashboard, nor will they show up on the platform's search page, the report said.
A Twitter thread brought attention to some of the absurd tags that ended up getting filtered out on iOS, including the tag "submission".
As per the report, a Tumblr user has been keeping track of all the blocked tags in a Google Doc. The user noted that most of these tags have been banned on iOS not on all devices and that the listed tags are subject to change.
Some banned tags are blatantly related to sexual, violent, or harmful content, but others don't seem to belong on the list, and may actually do more harm than good by staying on it.
For example, "girl," "sad," has been banned. "Single dad," "single mom," "single parent," "suicide prevention," and "testicular cancer" are also on the list, potentially harming those who want to seek support in any of these areas.
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