Tumblr has banned at least 446 words, including the name “Eugene Levy,” to satisfy Apple’s App Store guidelines.
Nicolás Rivero for Yahoo Finance:
Tumblr now limits users’ ability to search for posts tagged “bald,” “single dad,” “beard,” and “selfie,” among hundreds of other keywords, for fear of running afoul of Apple’s safety standards. In a Dec. 21 update, Tumblr developers said they were expanding “the definition of what sensitive content is as well as the way you access it in order to comply with [Apple’s] guidelines.” They noted that some search queries may turn up fewer results than usual, and others “might not produce any results at all.”
Apple’s safety policy states that iOS apps “should not include content that is offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste, or just plain creepy,” and goes on to detail specific prohibitions on porn, gore, hate speech, content that encourages self-harm, and so on.
A Tumblr user who runs a blog called bannedtags has compiled a list of at least 446 tags that Tumblr has blocked from appearing in search results, based on their own attempts to search for the words on the iOS app. In addition to blocking obviously fraught words like “penis,” “cocaine,” and “gore,” Tumblr also appears to ban innocuous words like “girl,” “sad,” and “me.”
Eugene LevyA sampling of Tumblr’s banned words
The Tumblr user who compiled the list of blocked words has stressed it’s not comprehensive and may change over time. But here are some of its stranger entries, as of the time of publication:
• About
• Big
• Eugene Levy
• Selfie
• Tony the Tiger…
Technovanguard Take: The amount of magic mushrooms routinely shipped into Apple’s App Store review office cubicle must be staggering.
I am the common man. I’m polite, I love my family, and I play by the rules… I like to have a regimen. I don’t like to be fancy free. — Eugene Levy
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