July 18, 2013 | Online

Tumblr founder promises porn will remain on the site

David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, is promising users of his popular microblogging site that there are no plans to ban pornographic content.

When Yahoo purchased the site for $1.1 billion in May, concerns were raised that Tumblr would be pressured to reduce or eliminate porn in order to appease potential advertisers. Karp doesn't see any reason for people to worry.

“Look,” Karp said during an interview with comedian Stephen Colbert, “we’ve taken a pretty hard line on freedom of speech, supporting our users’ creation, whatever that looks like, and that’s just not something we want to police.

"When you have somebody like Terry Richardson or any number of very talented photographers posting tasteful photography, I don’t want to have to go in there to draw the line between this photo and the behind-the-scenes photo of lady gaga and like, her nip,” he added.

However, Karp’s promise has an obvious expiry date. In the deal with Yahoo, he signed a 4-year contract that has given him a great deal of autonomy to run Tumblr as he sees fit; after that, all bets are off.

I think porn on Tumblr will soon be a distant memory.

David Karp Knows How Tumblr Will Handle Porn, Is Not So Sure About NSA [TechCrunch]