LOS ANGELES — Adult content creators on crowdfunding site Patreon are facing “a sudden spate of suspensions” over nudity, according to a published report.
Motherboard said in its report yesterday that some of those knocked off Patreon, a membership platform that makes it easy for artists and creators to get paid, were booted because of “implied nudity” in public areas or publicly visible patron tiers and banners.
Patreon’s guidelines for adult content state that “all public content on your page be appropriate for all audiences,” and “content with mature themes must be marked as a patron-only post."
Patreon, in a reply email to Motherboard, said that the platform has been ramping up the “proactive review of content on Patreon due to requirements from our payment partners.”
“According to a Patreon blog about creator fees, these partners include Stripe and PayPal (which has a history of refusing to serve sex workers), but the pressure to turn sex workers away comes from major banking networks,” Motherboard said.
According to Patreon guidelines, users can’t raise funds in order “to produce pornographic material such as maintaining a website, funding the production of movies, or providing a private webcam session.”
“Our community guidelines have not changed, and when we discover a page that is not in compliance with our guidelines we place that page in a state of suspension and work directly with the creator to bring them back within our guidelines,” a Patreon spokesman told Motherboard.
“We have also doubled the size of our support team to ensure we get back to creators and give them one-on-one guidance as fast as humanly possible."
Vex Ashley, founder of the independent erotic film production company Four Chambers, tweeted that his Patreon page was shut down.
“Just to be clear what is at stake, this is my whole income, my livelihood,” Ashley tweeted. “I have been full time working on Four Chambers exclusively for around three years now. I have devoted my whole self to the project and I am going to have to try to start again from scratch.”
Erotic model Nicole Vaunt told Motherboard that Patreon told her to remove any nudity or implied nudity from her Patreon public page and public posts. Vaunt did, and she hasn’t had problems since.
“But I'm honestly scared of losing my livelihood at any minute,” Vaunt told Motherboard. “Once Four Chambers was deleted it felt like the canary in the coal mine for all of us. This recent influx of suspensions and removals is a slippery slope.”
