Tumblr is cracking down on piracy-related content

Perhaps as a result of its acquisition by Yahoo, Tumblr appears to have taken a much stronger position against online piracy. There was an increase in takedown notices and blog terminations this week and now users searching for posts containing or being tagged with the word “torrent” are being given a page saying there are no results. 

It appears that piracy is becoming a growing concern for micro-blogging platform Tumblr. Earlier this week users panicked following an increase in takedown notices, which resulted in the termination of several blogs. While this uproar was rather public, there are also better concealed changes that seem to target pirated content. Tumblr’s decision to hide posts mentioning the word “torrent” for example. Those who search the site for “torrent” related queries will notice that there are no results displayed, even though there are plenty of posts mentioning the word. The same is true for posts tagged with “torrent.”