Tumblr users rally behind Citrus Scale to circumvent NSFW/adult content ban - will it work?

NOTE: For all latest, breaking news related to Tumblr adult content ban as well as its alternatives, head here.

In the first week of December last year, Tumblr officially announced it’s imposing a near total ban on adult or NSFW content on its platform. The announcement caught millions of users off guard who were already annoyed by the ‘Safe Mode turn off now working’ issue which cropped up in the third week of November.

Tumblr’s decision came after Apple booted out the Tumblr app from the App Store following the discovery of child porn, as such content is not inline with the App Store’s guidelines.

Following the announcement, Tumblr has been on rampage against NSFW content. However, the implementation of the ban has been severely criticized as a lot of innocent blogs and posts that were not even remotely adult have been banned by the company’s censoring bots in the process.

The implementation of this ban has so far relied heavily on deleting tags. In case you aren’t aware, images are tagged by users so that it’s easy to find images of a particular type, making it convenient for creators to reach audience and vice versa.

Needless to say, the NSFW tag was one of the first victims of this adult content ban. If you try searching ‘nsfw’ now, you’ll see Tumblr doesn’t return anything.

And of course, there are many other tags which have been removed:

It’s been over 1.5 months since the Tumblr ban came into force. People have (and still are) protesting against the move, and have even launched petitions, but all efforts remained futile. A large section of users had no alternative but to make a switch to available Tumblr alternatives.

Some of those who chose to remain with Tumblr tried to fool the censoring bots in multiple ways in order to circumvent the ban, but the loopholes were quickly fixed by the company. However, users don’t seem to be giving up.

Another such effort has come to light. There’s currently a lot of chatter on Tumblr about reverting back to the old Citrus Scale method of post tagging which was prevalent on Tumblr years back.

While many Tumblr users who have been on the platform since its initial years know what the Citrus Scale is, newer users are clueless.

What's the citrus scale?

— Stick with Bernie and you'll make it! (@0uttaS1TE) February 3, 2019

In case you aren’t aware, through Citrus Scale, you can tag romantic actions ranging from very mild to insanely wild. Tags include Citrus, Orange, Lime, Lemon, Grapefruit. Here’s an image explaining these:

As of now, we could not find evidence of Tumblr users starting to adopt the Citrus Scale, but there definitely has been a lot of buzz. For example, the word ‘lemon’ was among the trending searches this past weekend.

Here’s what a user wrote on Tumblr:

Lemon is trending above the f***ing super bowl. That’s it. We’re all dumbass horny fandom nerds on this f***ing site

And here are some reports from Twitter:

It would be interesting to see whether or not Tumblr users will actually start using this scale for post tagging purpose, and if that happens, how will Tumblr react to the development. Meanwhile, let us know what do you think about the Citrus Scale. Use the comments section below to share your thoughts.

NOTE: PiunikaWeb has covered in detail the Tumblr adult content ban as well as the platform’s alternatives, check out all updates here.

Follow @PiunikaWeb

PiunikaWeb is a unique initiative that mainly focuses on investigative journalism. This means we do a lot of hard work to come up with news stories that are either ‘exclusive,’ ‘breaking,’ or ‘curated’ in nature. Perhaps that’s the reason our work has been picked by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and more. Do take a tour of our website to get a feel of our work. And if you like what we do, stay connected with us on Twitter (@PiunikaWeb) and other social media channels to receive timely updates on stories we publish.