Last week Tumblr announced that from 17 December the platform would no longer be hosting pornography of any kind on its site. The move was widely criticised.

As Tumblr began the task of removing the type of adult content it had become synonymous with ahead of the outright ban, users took to Twitter to migrate and preserve their posts, but also to ridicule the platform’s bizarre new judgment calls. Art depicting a vomiting unicorn, a photo of Joe Biden, a raw chicken labelled “Patrick”, and a man hugging a lion all became #TooSexyForTumblr as its algorithm incorrectly flagged them as inappropriate. “Tumblr’s AI is basically a stoned 13-year-old boy,” one user said. “Everything looks like a butt.”

Tumblr’s AI is basically a stoned 13-year-old boy. Everything looks like a butt Tumblr user

Tumblr’s decision to remove all adult content was provoked by an incident last month involving child pornography, which was discovered on the site after its moderation systems failed to detect it. The platform was swiftly removed from the Apple App Store, which has a strict no-adult-content policy.

But preventing the spread of child pornography is something many other platforms seem to handle just fine without the drastic removal of all adult content. It’s arguable that Tumblr’s decision has less to do with a desire to “[lay] the foundation for a better Tumblr”, as CEO Jeff D’Onofrio said, than with a need to bow to the pressures exerted on it by Apple’s growing control over online content via its App store. In fact, along with wearing black turtlenecks and dropping acid, one of the unfortunate postures Steve Jobs made ubiquitous in the tech sector is prudery towards adult content. Apple has been consistent in its resistance against it, with Jobs famously saying that “users who want porn can get an android phone”. As a consequence, fewer and fewer services support adult content due to the moral policing carried out by Apple.

The increasing crackdown on porn in the tech community is nothing new (see Craigslist losing its personals section this year), but Tumblr’s decision is particularly distressing in that the platform had evolved over the years into a sanctuary for non-normative and female-centric sexuality. Since the announcement, the adult content community and users have been mourning the vacuum it leaves. It was arguably the last place where feminist, kink, queer, and gender non-normative adult content flourished online. Accounts were carefully curated over years, and offered a sense of commonality to people with even the most niche interests or predilections. It is (or was) a space infinitely more tolerant and diverse than the rest of the porn world. It received praise as a space for gender transition stories as well as a place for queer sexual identities.

In 2015 more mainstream websites such as Bustle and Refinery29, and even the Telegraph, began writing about female-friendly porn Tumblrs. They read like porn-101 guides, pushing adult Tumblrs into the mainstream and bringing them to young women who were perhaps struggling to find adult content that wasn’t at worst disturbing, or at best simply a turn-off. In a survey carried out by Marie Claire in 2015, 56% of women said they felt uncomfortable with the portrayal of women in mainstream porn. Tumblr represented an outwardly feminist and even ethical alternative. Its carefully curated content offered a more positive vision of sex to these women, one predicated on body positivity, diversity, female pleasure, and often intimacy. It became the place you went to enjoy porn by women for women – looped footage focusing on female gratification; photographs depicting women with relatable body types; writing and art closer to the sensual than the explicit; fan art drawing on female sexual fantasies; diverse representations of desirable hetero men; and a sense of humour.

In his blog post about the ban, D’Onofrio attempted to acknowledge Tumblr’s significance as an outlet for marginalised groups. “We recognise Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey” – but, he added: “Bottom line: There are [sic] no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them.”

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D’Onofrio failed to recognise how the disappearance of Tumblr porn in particular strips women and female-identifying people of a space they had claimed for female experience and feminist expression that was also, importantly, free! And while alternative sites are available and gaining traction, the reality is that in the current anti-porn climate, and the ubiquity of the Apple App Store, it will be difficult to have the same widespread impact as Tumblr had.

This capitulation exposes what was already known: that the non-normative adult community is at odds with the heteronormative values of Silicon Valley – what’s more, this particularly targets women. Tumblr’s new revised guidelines prohibit “female-presenting nipples” and state that “written content such as erotica, nudity related to political or newsworthy speech, and nudity found in art, such as sculptures and illustrations, are also stuff that can be freely posted”. Who is to decide what is “political or newsworthy speech”? What is going to classify exactly as “art”? And where do we draw the line between “erotica” and porn? Making that call is not simply a matter of standards but rather arbitrary, and can involve politically charged decisions with very specific cultural repercussions.

When tech companies leverage their power to police what is sexually acceptable, it should be seen for what it is – a bid to control our most intimate lives and personal connections alongside everything else they now control in the public sphere.

As our romantic and sexual lives become increasingly intertwined with our online lives, the adult content available in the digital commons is an important frontier where narratives can be negotiated and reframed, particularly those of women and gender non-normative people. We should not allow tech companies with paternalistic and puritanical attitudes towards porn to take control of that narrative or to have the last word.

• Roisin Agnew is an Irish journalist and screenwriter