Tumblr’s ban on pornography and adult content has led to a fifth of its users deserting the platform, figures reveal.

The ban, which came into effect on 17 December, provoked a backlash from users who claimed it would penalise sex-positive, LGBT and NSFW art communities.

Visits to the Tumblr website fell from 521 million in December to 437 million in January, according to data from web analytics firm SimilarWeb.

Tumblr’s decision to update its content policy came after the discovery of child sexual abuse imagery on its blogs.

The ban goes far beyond illegal content, however, as it covers “photos, videos, or Gifs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content – including photos, videos, Gifs and illustrations – that depict sex acts.”

7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit Show all 7 1 /7 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit Claude Shannon (1916-2001) Shannon took the work done by Boole and re-purposes it for computers, allowing us to understand how to share information with the. It begun “information theory” — a system of thought that would let us build the internet Getty 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) The internet now is largely algorithms: formulas or procedures that computers can run to solve problems. Those are so deeply integrated into our world that they are almost invisible. But Lovelace created the first one, in the early 19th century, helping lay the groundwork for the machine learning and artificial intelligence that now runs the internet Getty 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit George Boole (1815-1864) Boole helped formulate the kind of logic that would allow the internet and the binary that powers it to flourish. The structures of thinking that he proposed would eventually come to allow computers to understand us, and power the search engines that we use to get around the internet Getty 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit Leonard Kleinrock (1934-) Kleinrock helped formulate the idea of packet switching, a central part of the way that computers are able to share information with each other over networks. The theoretical frameworks that he proposed would eventually become the same technology that allows almost every computer in the world to send and receive information from the internet Getty 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit Vint Cerf (1943-) and Robert Kahn (1938-) Together Cerf and Kahn helped invent the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). Those two technologies decide how computers communicate each other — in essence creating the internet as we know it Getty 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit Ray Tomlinson (1941-) Life online wouldn’t be what it is today without email. Tomlinson created a system to allow people to send messages to each other over ARPANET Andreu Veà 7 people who helped create the internet and don’t get any credit Larry Roberts (1937-) Larry Roberts helped create ARPANET, a military network that helped uncover and prove many of the technologies that would go on to power the internet. While Tim Berners-Lee often gets hailed for creating the web, Roberts also contributed to the early work that went into helping him Michel Bakni

Certain exceptions mean that erotic text can still be posted to Tumblr blogs, as well as nudity related to political or newsworthy speech, and nudity found in art.

In defending the ban, Tumblr said it still wanted to still be a platform for LGBTQ+ conversations.

“Tumblr will always be a place to explore your identity,” it wrote. “Tumblr has always been home to marginalized communities and always will be,” Tumblr wrote.

“We fully recognise Tumblr’s special obligation to these communities and are committed to ensuring that our new policy on adult content does not silence the vital conversations that take place here every day.”

The decision to ban adult content on Tumblr proved controversial among many users and prompted a movement known as the “log off” protest to encourage people to leave the site.

One online petition calling for the policy to be reversed receiving more than 600,000 signatures.

“Let people post porn, it’s 90 per cent of the reason anybody is on the site in the first place,” the petition states.