This week, the social networking site Tumblr banned the very thing that drove many people to its site: adult content. Many cheered that Tumblr had finally caught up with the times, echoing anti-pornography policies adopted by Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and others. But there was another set of voices you might not have heard — the voices of women and the L.G.B.T.Q. community — who pointed out that this change will destroy a safe space for self-expression, discovery and connection.

While we can get hung up on debating what kind of content should or shouldn’t be allowed on a particular platform, none of that alters an equally important but less-visible problem: When tech companies tackle large-scale problems with large-scale solutions, underrepresented groups are often further marginalized as a result.

The change in Tumblr policy seems to have been born from a reasonable concern. In this case, child pornography was discovered on the platform. There is, of course, a big difference between child pornography and adult content, but Tumblr may have decided that the only way to effectively filter out the former was to eradicate the latter. Or it may simply have decided that moderating pornography was too expensive. Whatever the case, Tumblr said that it was all in favor of creative expression and deep community, but that it would ban all adult content — specifically, all “images, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples,” and any content depicting sex acts.

This is not the first time a social media or blog platform has banned adult content. Twitter, Facebook, and many other platforms all prohibit pornography. But in the United States, we seem to ignore public debate about the censorship of sex and the human body, reflecting the American tendency to get more offended by the sight of a female-presenting nipple than by guns, hate speech or violence.