Taking a stance against supporters of self-inflicted harm, Tumblr announced today that it will amend its ethics guidelines to outlaw blogs that promote anorexia, bulimia, cutting, suicide and other destructive behaviors.
Up till now, the platform had not intervened to stop such controversial usage patterns.
"One of the great things about Tumblr is that people use it for just about every conceivable kind of expression," the company wrote today in a blog post. "People being people, though, that means that Tumblr sometimes gets used for things that are just wrong.
"We are deeply committed to supporting and defending our users’ freedom of speech," the post continued, "But we do draw some limits."
Tumblr will begin implementing the new policy next week. As a part of the changes, searches on the site for red-flag terms like "anorexia" and "thinspiration" will trigger public service warnings alerting the user to the damaging effects of such behaviors.
