For Peach*, 20, her work hours are mostly when people are getting ready for bed. Her days are filled with planning for her night shift — which makeup and outfits she’ll wear that evening, what themes her videos will have. When she’s finally ready for work, she logs onto Tumblr and starts filming from one to five hours for her audience and clients.

Peach is one of many sex workers who use the social media platform Tumblr to showcase their work, build a client base, and garner the attention of online fans. But for many workers, the platform that they base their livelihood on could shut them and their businesses out — forever.

“I will be very harshly impacted by this financially,” Peach told Teen Vogue in an email interview. “[Tumblr] was my main source of income and it was amazing, too. My feelings are complex. It's a mix of sad, angry, confused, and hurt.”

Earlier this week, Tumblr announced that it would ban adult content from its website, starting on December 17. Under the ban, any form of media displaying or depicting sex acts, “real-life human genitals,” and “female-presenting nipples” will be deleted or set to private and viewable only by the original poster, so the posts can’t be seen or reblogged by other users. According to the Verge, Tumblr had recently been cleaning up its platform at a quicker pace..

“We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content,” Tumblr CEO Jeff D'Onofrio wrote in a blog post, published Monday. “In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.”

But Tumblr’s announcement triggered a wave of worry among sex workers and activists who rely on the platform to do much of their work, like Peach. For years, Tumblr had allowed communities that promoted and shared adult content freely, thanks to Tumblr’s arguably lax approach to the monitoring of adult content.

“On Tumblr, I found it to be much more ‘open’, no ‘must join this group to see content’ kind of stuff,” said Tiffany Black*, a 27-year-old trans female sex worker, whose Tumblr account is where the majority of her fans are. “I don’t think they (Tumblr) really realize just how much of their site is ‘adult oriented.’”