Tumblr Removed From Apple Store Over Child Pornography Concerns

A few days ago, Tumblr noticed that the popular social app was suddenly missing from the iOS App Store. Though the reasons were unclear at the time, the team behind the app are clarifying why the sudden take-down.

In a statement to the site’s users:

“We’re committed to helping build a safe online environment for all users, and we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to media featuring child sexual exploitation and abuse. As this is an industry-wide problem, we work collaboratively with our industry peers and partners like NCMEC to actively monitor content uploaded to the platform.”

The team then went into how they usually go about site safety, including image scans: “Every image uploaded to Tumblr is scanned against an industry database of known child sexual abuse material, and images that are detected never reach the platform. A routine audit discovered content on our platform that had not yet been included in the industry database. We immediately removed this content. Content safeguards are a challenging aspect of operating scaled platforms. We’re continuously assessing further steps we can take to improve and there is no higher priority for our team.”

Since then, it’s been updated to let Apple users know that they are actively working to get it back into the iOS App Store once the issue has been resolved. While the team does claim that they run a tight ship over content, dangerous material managed to seep through which prompted the swift action.

Tumblr users have been using the news to poke fun at the issue, with jokes like “We did, we broke Tumblr,” though that was prior to the reason going public. We still don’t know when the app will once again become available, but it looks like that’s a high priority right now for the team so hopefully they can get it up and running in the way it’s meant to function.

To stay up-to-date with what’s going on with the state of accessibility for the popular app, you can keep tabs on the Tumblr Help Center right here.