I think I see the disconnect here.
You’re saying that from the perspective of the Tumblr people, having been purchased by Yahoo/Verizon, there were limited options. And maybe negotiations with Apple came into play once the CSAM problem was already so bad the app was delisted.
What I’m saying is that from the consumer perspective, it doesn’t really matter who in the company made the choice (Tumblr people or Verizon people), a business choice was made to remove a significant part of the users and use case for the platform.
Similarly by the time Apple banned the app for CSAM, maybe it truly was too late to keep NSFW content on the platform for Apple users, and maybe it was seen by ownership as too expensive to implement a partial solution. Regardless of ownership, failing to invest in effective moderation and flagging tools at every point in Tumblr’s journey was a business choice.
Maybe it was too expensive to keep CSAM off the platform. I don’t see evidence that Tumblr made those investments. An easy reporting option for users is the bare minimum. Maybe Tumblr would have bankrupted themselves policing that content - but choosing to not go down that road is still a business decision and still not something that can realistically be pinned on Apple.
In other words there are two versions of the story:
- Excuse: we had to take down NSFW content platform wide because Apple hates adult content
- Explanation: we didn’t have the resources to police an NSFW platform effectively, so we made a business decision to drop that segment of our business