Lifestyle

High School Dropout Millionaire Has No Plans To Take X-Rated Content Off Tumblr

Since selling his company to Yahoo! for $1.1 billion, Tumblr CEO David Karp has continuously remained in the public's eye with the media queuing up to find the answers to two basic questions: How did Tumblr get to where it is? And where does it go from here?

That was essentially the theme that surrounded Karp's interview with Steven Colbert last night as the Comedy Central personality quizzed the founder on many topics, including some of the more raunchy content that a few of the 120 million blogs on the site post daily.

Asked about the "tons" of porn that appears on Tumblr, Karp told Colbert, "Look, we've taken a pretty hard line on freedom of speech, supporting our users, creation, whatever that looks like, and it's just not something that we want to police."

Karp's main "defense" was primarily based on the fact that it is an all inclusive platform. If there is a lot of porn on Tumblr, he says, it's because there's a lot of everything on the site. It's a pretty simple concept.

The interview, though, which was taped around seven p.m. on Tuesday, also set up a bizarre twist that occurred on the blogging platform that very night.

When asked what he would say to the NSA should the agency approach him in search of members' information, he responded,  "we don't want to give you anything that's not in the best interest of our users and we've fought for that for six years," reassuring users that they had nothing to worry about when it comes to security issues regarding their information.

That is, until hours later when the staff's official profile had to post an alert for iPhone and iPad users saying that they needed to download an update to combat an issue Tumblr discovered that allowed the passwords of users on those mobile platforms to be compromised.

The site also apologized for the mistake, stating, "Please know that we take your security very seriously and are tremendously sorry for this lapse and inconvenience."

Although Karp says he has no plans to censor users' content, one change that is coming to Tumblr, is the addition of ads, with the CEO announcing he plans to find the most "creative" of them to make his site better.

Photo Courtesy: Tumblr