Patreon Is Suspending Adult Content Creators Because of Its Payment Partners (vice.com)

Some adult content creators on crowdfunding site Patreon are being suspended due to the suggestive material they produce. The platform said that they are increasing efforts to review content, due to payment processor pressure. Motherboard reports: In late 2017, Patreon expanded its adult content guidelines, to include stricter guidelines for "bestiality, incest, sexual depiction of minors, and suggestive sexual violence." At the time, it resulted in suspensions and bans of many adult content creators whose work Patreon previously permitted, but no longer fell in line with new guidelines. Now, many more adult content creators are reporting that they're experiencing a renewed wave of suspensions on the platform. 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." For several of these reports, Patreon warned that "implied nudity" was the reason for the suspension, where it appeared in public areas or publicly-visible patron tiers and banners. "You can't use Patreon to raise funds in order to produce pornographic material such as maintaining a website, funding the production of movies, or providing a private webcam session," the guidelines state.

Comments

Middlemen should be invisible

[Anonymous Coward]

Now they're propping themselves up like kings.

Re:Middlemen should be invisible

[KiloByte]

This. A payment processor should never be allowed to refuse any legal transaction, when in a doubt that's the police's work not theirs. An ISP should never be allowed to ban or slow down any sites, any questions of legality need to go to the police not to the middlemen (and even then, it's not up to the ISP to enact bans). A non-curated (ie, done by the public rather than exclusively by the provider) news/blog/etc site should never be allowed to discriminate content based on political views. Etc, etc.

Re:Middlemen should be invisible

[alvinrod]

It's not always the payment processors that are pushing for this directly. There are often laws put in place designed to crack down on certain behaviors (see Craigslist closing down their personals section recently) and payment services are required to abide by them. If the laws are vaguely defined then the processors are going to be more strict than necessary because running afoul of law even once is nightmare for them.

Think of it this way. If I'm a payment processor I get paid by processing payments. I really don't care if those are for groceries, commissioned artworks, illicit drugs, or prostitutes. I get paid either way and it's in my best interest to process as many payments as possible. However, the government isn't powerful enough to be able to even put a dent in behavior it doesn't like and can't even begin to unilaterally enforce it. So they make laws that make processing payments for certain things illegal. It's much easier for them to go after me than it is hundreds of people buying drugs, so it's in my interest to not let anyone pay for anything that looks like illegal drugs using my system even if that means I inadvertently prevent some hippies from buying some herbal tea that's in no way illegal from time to time. You can still get that without laws (say that 90% of my customers are Mormons and don't want me to process payments for coffee) but it's rare.

And even though I disagree with the new age puritanism that's making the rounds, I don't think it's my right to tell a company that they can't give in to pressure from their customers if they want to. If they think keeping the 90% Mormon customers at the expense of losing the other 10% is better than potentially losing a good chunk of 90% of their customers, that's their own business decision. If it's a bad business move, they'll fail and get replaced by a company that does a better job of serving consumers.

Only in America

[nagora]

is "implied nudity" a reason to ban something but banning weapons that enable you to massacre a crowd from a quarter of a mile away is controversial.

Re:The transactions are high risk

[Hognoxious]

If these disputes were half as onerous as you claim then the porno industry would have packed up business years ago.

It hasn't. Umm, or so I'm told.

Big opportunity

[Kohath]

The same thing is happening to firearms dealers doing online sales (which have all the same safeguards and background checks as in-person sales — and actually more traceability because credit card sales are more traceable than cash sales).

Presumably these payment processors won't allow legal marijuana sales either. The realm of socially disapproved behavior grows larger every day.

This creates a big, expanding opportunity for a payment processor who won't bow to the Twitter mobs and their blacklists and witch hunts.

Re:The odds of my kid getting gunned down

[JaredOfEuropa]

And pretty much all statistics and research into the subject shows that the best ways to fight teen pregnancies are good sexual education and access to prophylactics and birth control, not repression, pretending sex doesn't exist, censoring porn, or preaching abstinence.

Re:Good.

[nightfire-unique]

Has what's right and wrong changed since 1938?

No. What changed is that we're generally better educated, and today many people are able to successfully reject the onslaught of religious idiocy that was much more prevalent back then.

The phrase "smut peddler" harkens back to an age when North America was dominated by religious people looking to control the sexuality of stupid people for monetary and/or power gains, and so intelligent people mock those who use it today.

Re:The transactions are high risk

[MtHuurne]

Adult content has a high percentage of disputes (probably from guys who's wives/girlfriends notice the charge).

That doesn't apply to Patreon though, since Patreon charges just show up as "Patreon" on the credit card statement; the specific creators that received the money are listed in an e-mail instead.