Patreon Begins To Purge Fan Art Of Characters Below A Certain Height And Bust Size
In the latest escalation of the platform’s continued authoritarian attempts to wrestle freedom of expression away from the hands of its creators, Patreon has reportedly taken steps to ban artwork featuring characters below a certain height and/or bust size.
This new policy first came to light on June 1st when, after artist @Laosduude inquired to Patreon support as to the reasons why his account had suddenly and seemingly randomly been determined to be in violation of the sites policies.
As seen in a message shared by @Laosduude to Twitter, a Patreon representative by the name of Marty explained in reply to the artist that his account could be brought back into good standing if he edited a number of his artworks which the site’s staff perceived to depict characters with ‘underage’ features.
“While you can use the Tanner scale [a scale used to measure a person’s sexual maturity based on the presence or absence of various secondary human sex characteristics] for reference,” Marty instructed.
“You can also consider rendering specific physical features to be more in line with the physical development of a full-grown-adult-some examples that come to mind are head to body ratio, height, and/or breast size,” they representative added. “Updating these features would be a step in the right direction; feel free to send any renderings my way so that we can check the progress against our guidelines.”
Marty concluded, “Updating these features would be a step in the right direction; feel free to send any renderings my way so that we can check the progress against our guidelines.”
“That’s Every Marie Rose anim I ever made that needs to be removed from my main socials,” said @Laosduude. “Now part of the Elin and Horse club alt social. I saw that even Smutbase, a place of public 3D models also had to remove Marie Rose and similar content.”
Sure enough, as noted by @Laosduude, the 3D modelling-centric site Smutbase also “received a message from Patreon, regarding certain uploads that violated their Community Guidelines and Terms of Use.”
“Patreon enforces their polices for not just content that’s posted to their site, but anything a creator does that’s funded through their site,” elaborated site propietor ‘Salaryman’ through the site’s Discord (via Sankaku Complex) on May 25th. “That means all content on Smutbase, Open3DLab and SFMLab must adhere to Patreon’s conduct as well, by association. Their demands were: remove the content provided as an example. But also, review ALL CONTENT LINKED TO THE PATREON PAGE.”
Salaryman further explained, “In order to adhere to the content guidelines, all content on the sites needs to be reviewed for ‘graphic depictions of sexual violence/rape/non-con’, ‘sexualized representation of minors (including lolicon/shotacon)’, as well as certain types of furry content (feral, bestiality, etc.). This includes situation where the project or model itself might be acceptable, but the preview images are suggestive or in violation of the previous mentioned content policies.”
“This is no easy task,” he affirmed. There are thousands of uploads on the sites, and to review anything that may have slipped through the cracks would take me ages to process. And I have less than two weeks to comply, or risk getting suspended from Patreon.”
“So I’m asking for your help review/moderating all existing Smutbase, Open3DLab and SFMLab!” exclaimed the site admin in conclusion to his post. ” I’m looking for a group of maybe 10 people at first. Maybe more if we’re not making it through the uploads fast enough.”
Following this request, on May 29th, Salaryman updated the site’s users on the ongoing review efforts, noting that “Some projects have had their title and description updated. Some projects had their preview images deleted or removed. Some projects will be deleted soon.”
“Regarding the projects that will be deleted: There’s a substantial number of uploads will be deleted,” he said. “This list mainly contains projects featuring (questionable) anime characters, feral furry content or gore, that were previously believed to be within acceptable content guidelines, or weren’t manually reviewed. Especially for fans of Genshin Impact, My Hero Academia, Pokemon and feral dragons and dinosaurs will be particularly crushed.”
As seen on the playfully titled ‘Bye Bye List‘, works featuring such characters as Into The Spider-Verse’s Gwen Stacy, My Hero Academia’s Ochako Uraraka, and nearly every member of the Genshin Impact cast.
In a follow-up post made to the site’s Discord some time later, Salaryman announced that after submitting 300 of the site’s uploads to Patreon for final review, “about 50 will end up being permanently removed unless the preview images are sanitized/updated/removed.”
“I’m personally not very happy with the scattershot/inconsistent results of Patreon’s final review of the list,” he added, “but it’s good to know that the list of pages that feature really unacceptable content is much smaller than before.”
“Furthermore,” Salaryman revealed, “another requirement from Patreon was to better clean/moderate the Discord server.”
“I’m still undecided on what to do there,” he told users. “I deleted the message they took issue with, but their demand was to go through every media file ever posted in here. Which is just not feasible for a chat with 6 years of history. So I might choose to selectively go back and delete a few files, simply nuke all chat history and be done with it, or do nothing at all.”
He ultimately concluded, “Once that’s taken care of, the threat of suspension will hopefully be abated for the time being. From that point on, I will look for potential ways to diversify payments. That may include subscribestar, or any other methods. We will see.”
What are you thoughts on the latest escalation from Patreon? Let us know your thoughts on social media or in the comments down below!
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