Patreon Bans Lolicon & R**e: “We’ll Call The Cops On You”

Top begging-as-a-service provider Patreon has launched a massive crackdown on creators producing wrongthink art, protecting the rights and safety of fictional children by purging all material deemed “child exploitation” (lolicon) along with “glorification of sexual violence” and threatening to dob any creators of such in to the authorities for good measure.

These attacks on adult content creators were actually part of a bigger overhaul for Patreon’s community guidelines – the previous guidelines in regards to adult content:

The new guidelines are almost Twitter-tier in their craven and arbitrary promotion of the values of those-who-must-not-be-named, even down to the “because Game of Thrones” logic:

Naturally many have been pointing out the hypocrisy of Patreon’s mass suspensions despite the new guidelines saying that the content presented by those accounts are “allowed”.

Colin Sullivan, the “head of legal” at Patreon, further clarified the reason why these changes were made:

“As part of updating the Community Guidelines, we’re taking a clearer stance on some fringe areas of Adult Content.

Over the past few months, there’s been a lot of discussion among our Trust and Safety team about how we can better articulate how we evaluate certain areas of content.

It became evident that we needed to outline a clearer stance on some fringe adult content.

With today’s update, we’re also being more clear about specific categories of fictional erotic content that Patreon cannot be used to support (including incest, bestiality, sexual depiction of minors, and suggestive sexual violence).

We want to be clear that this stronger stance on fringe content has surfaced a small number of creators that need to update their pages. And that’s where the next update on our Trust and Safety commitments comes in.

We have implemented a better process for warning and guiding affected creators and content.

We think it’s important for all creators to have a second chance, so a lot of these updates have been focused on appeal and reinstatement.

In addition, all communications with creators include a chance for appeal. Some key parts of this update include:

Whenever possible, we’ll give creators a chance to change their Patreon page to bring the content back within the Community Guidelines.

Aside from blatant violations of Community Guidelines (such as hosting terrorist content, doxing, or very clear hate speech), removing a Patreon page completely is a last resort after we’ve offered a chance to update the content.

Creators will receive one-on-one guidance from a Trust and Safety Representative regarding the changes they need to make to reinstate their page.

While creators are making changes, their Patreon page will be suspended but not deleted.

Pledges will be paused and patrons will not be charged again until the page is reinstated.”

These new changes were accompanied by suspensions of the accounts of various big-name ero-animators, such as Mantis-X, LewdLab, PestilenceSFM and noname55 to name a few – though oddly enough, others were seemingly unaffected such as Studio Fow and Zone.

An example of some of the messages being sent out to creators:

In order for these ero-animators to be within Patreon’s new tyrannical guidelines, alterations such as these have been made (along with the removal of direct links to adult content and words such as “loli” or “daughter”):

This has made some suspect that it is only the Patreon accounts themselves that need to be voided of any and all “offensive content” (as opposed to the games or ero-animations directly – although linking to them is apparently verboten all the same).

As usual, it is the hapless contributors of content to such narrative-enforcing platforms who must offer themselves up as guinea pigs to discover what facile rubric will appease the demands of their masters for the time being.