⚠ Important Information: Policy Livestream, 20th May 2025 ⚠

Thank you for waiting on this write-up of Patreon’s policy livestream of Tuesday, 20th May 2025. 

As with previous write-ups, this report will summarise the hour-long stream, focusing on what may/will affect all Patreon users.  Admittedly, this write-up will be a fair bit shorter as Patreon has been more pro-active, alerting people far more effectively via:

• e-mail,

• pop-up notifications on Patreon

• social media (predominantly, the official Patreon Discord: https://discord.gg/patreon)

• Patreon News Blog:  https://news.patreon.com/

• Patreon-for-Creators, here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/PatreonforCreators .  You do not require a Patreon account to view any of these posts as they are public-facing.

EDIT: The Policy Livestream has been archived here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/mid-year-policy-129468897    All images will be saved as attachments to download at their original size.  A text-only file is available to download.

This stream was hosted by Courtney Duffy, from the Policy Team, and Erin Han, Patreon’s new vice-president of Trust and Safety.  Han brings over 15 years of experience of Trust and Safety experience from companies like TikTok, Uber, Twitter and Google, where he helped construct system to protect communities, whilst supporting creative freedoms.

Patreon’s Trust and Safety Principles

After introducing Han, a fair bit of time was spent on Patreon’s new position as what it deemed itself as a medium-sized enterprise; no longer just a crowd funding site, but “Home for Creative Businesses.”   With that in mind, Han wanted to make the Trust and Safety Team’s principles crystal clear.

Highlighted was the newly implemented Transparency Report, this year’s edition of which you can view here: https://news.patreon.com/articles/patreontransparencyreport2025

I suspect this was in response to the horror stories of how inhuman the Trust and Safety Team came off as in the past (and arguably the present) from many a disgruntled (ex-) Content Creator or Audience Member.  Indeed, someone asked in the chat

“Which types of tools are used for policy and moderation?  AI?  Humans?  Something else?”

(this was indirectly answered later in the Question-and-Answer section).

 Han himself said:

“In times of distress, we often fall back to training.”

Ergo, Patreon is endeavouring to consider the perspective of creators and people behind the content.

The Patreon Trust and Safety Team point-of-contact was pointed out as a first step: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=12546204476173 and also the Creator Hub: https://creatorhub.patreon.com/en-GBas as a resource.  This will be expanded upon later.

Policy proposals for your consideration

Given Patreon’s very public shift gearing towards podcasts and livestreams, as evidenced here : https://news.patreon.com/articles/introducing-our-podcast-network-initiative-collaborating-with-select-sony-and-wondery-shows  and here: https://www.patreon.com/en-GB/apps/crowdcast , new Community Guidelines will come into play to ensure these newer forms of content creation on Patreon itself aren’t used to skirt around the distribution of material that contravenes said Guidelines.

A certain video-gameplay-footage streaming website with certain female activities comes to my mind’s eye…

Nothing concrete has manifested yet, but generally, Community Guidelines apply, viewable here: https://www.patreon.com/en-GB/policy/guidelines  and in relation to activities that cannot be hosted on Patreon itself, but is permissible, here: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/35092255980173-Guidance-around-our-off-Patreon-activity-policy

Interestingly, two questions Adult Content Creator had were pre-emptively answered in the next topic: one rather brazen about exactly what it is they do on their Patreon and

“how much they could get away with being wild”

(which I shan’t detail); another, seeking clarification on what is and what is not allowed in a public-facing title/preview.

With merchandising options now available directly from Patreon itself (more info about it here: https://www.patreon.com/merch ), the Commerce Guidelines have been updated: https://www.patreon.com/policy/benefits, along with the rules for 18+ Content Creators specifically: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/36188028163725-Understanding-Public-Previews-and-Commerce-guidelines-for-adult-18-creators

Generally, the Policy Guidance for Adult/18+ Shops (and by extension what your public-facing Patreon profile page can show) is:

Bringing forward a more in-depth answer from the Question-and-Answer Session, quote:

Additional updates and developments

Admittedly, I rather zoned out here so in short, they went on about this stuff:

Please peruse these at your leisure, via here: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/sections/35272808308109 , https://stopncii.org/  and https://gifct.org/

Duffy did make a point of stating that Patreon is now actively a part of the Internet Works Coalition as “they don’t trust the decisions made by only a few big players; Patreon is a medium-sized business and wants to have a voice to speak up on behalf of micro- independent businesses on the platform”.

To briefly contextualize this, back in 2020, a lot of USA-based internet companies including DropBox, Etsy, Yahoo, Indeed, Vimeo, TripAdvisor, eBay, (and of course Patreon) joined together and are working with US Congress to, quote:

• Strengthen the ability of companies and nonprofits to establish robust and transparent terms of service and enforcement systems to moderate content on their platforms.

• Support a unified, comprehensive approach to reform, avoiding piecemeal efforts that would create a fragmented policy environment and discourage innovation.

• Ensure that any Section 230 reform effort receives a thorough, bipartisan, and thoughtful review that such a foundational law deserves.

I don’t want to linger on politics (especially as I’m not American nor based in North America myself) so you can read what Section 230 is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230

And you can see what the Internet Works Coalition is and what they’re doing here: https://theinternet.works/

Anyway, to bring forward a sceptical question raised ahead of the stream that went:

That said, it was definitively stated no exchange of information that can personally identify a singular individual takes place.  And GIFCT is a non-profit organisation not run by any of the mega-corporations.  With a focus on developing best practises, joint research and sharing knowledge of well-known spurious content, GIFCT was set up in such a way so no single company could tailor it to their own personal agenda…  So make of that what you will.

Pre-submitted Q&A

Now, this kept jumping between questions asked in the stream itself, and questions submitted ahead of time.   I’ll do my best to abridge lengthier/more repetitive dialogue and merge similar questions and answers together where appropriate. 

I think this was referring to external pressures taking a very puritanical approach in recent years, both by certain payment processors and notable individuals in power, irrespective of geography… 

Anyway, Patreon emphasized that

“free and open expression is the cornerstone of communities on Patreon,”

and that the Trust and Safety Team are not a Government bending to the whims of external pressures and policing what people should think or say. 

This is the main ethos of the Patreon Policy team, who do NOT take any actions based on who is in power.  That said, Patreon is subject to the rules and regulations of the payment processors and legal ramifications—i.e. ID Verification.  Patreon is actively working with various coalitions to protect Patreon’s Content Creators. 

Additionally, diversity of opinion must respect the dignity of others, and the platform won’t allow harmful behaviours that contravene the Community Guidelines.  (This will be expanded upon later as one of the last questions raised was centred on safeguarding). 

Of note was one audience member who responded with:

To summarise a long answer, the Patreon Trust and Safety Team is committed to fairness and transparency; it was for this reason primarily that the Appeals process was overhauled last year, introducing a more robust means of contesting moderators’ decisions (viewable here: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004403323-My-page-has-been-taken-down-what-can-I-do)  Funds are now withheld for 28 days, which gives the Patreon Trust and Safety Team to review the account in question if an account is in trouble.  More information about Trust and Safety here: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/sections/360011949472-Trust-Safety

Can you expand upon the intersection between AI and Patreon Policy Initiatives?

Patreon is not anti-AI but a human creator-first platform, prioritizing the protection the rights and livelihoods of people who make up the platform.  Clear policies are being created both internally and externally to protect content creators, but also real people.  Hence the stance of blocking OpenAI’s data-scraper for its toolset, and disallowing AI-generated ultra-realistic humans to avoid skirting around using real people who did NOT give permission to be used in 18+ content. 

Whilst some automated processes are used to detect contraventions, Patreon’s human-led time proactively and reactively relies on feedback from its users, who help shape and form policies around this fast evolving technology.  UNESCO and the G7 and other political organisations are actively working on this and Patreon continues trying to maintain balance between free expression and keeping people safe from being exploited by machine-learning models, etc.  The Trust and Safety Team are always thinking on data governance, privacy, transparency, open-access, accountability, etc…

Admittedly, I had to look up what the acronym meant… it means left-✋path, or “good/lawful/white magic.”  Patreon said:

As an adult content creator, I sometimes get comments from supporters that might be inappropriate under Patreon’s guidelines; how responsible am I for moderating those comments?  Could I face consequences if I don’t remove them myself?

Patreon want to foster healthy communities and recognises that no one can truly control the behaviour of their members.  You can report breaches of behaviour and you can delete unacceptable comments, as well as being able to block: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/207982093-Everything-you-need-to-know-about-Blocking-a-member

“It takes a village to enable a safe and welcoming and mindful environment”, the onus isn’t solely on the Creator alone; members are also responsible.

And lastly:

Clickable support link here:  https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/sections/35272808308109

The stream then ended here as the hour was up.

For the next week until 27th May 2025, there will be a thread on this on Patreon’s official Discord here: https://discord.gg/patreon -- the thread in relation to the Policy Livestream is #policy-live-qa, via: https://discord.com/invite/twZ86k9ChC

Patreon can be contacted for further information; various means to do so are detailed here: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042749811-How-to-contact-Patreon-Product-Support

Or by email here: CreatorPolicy@Patreon.com

EDIT: A reminder that the Policy Livestream has been archived here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/mid-year-policy-129468897 Should you want to watch it yourself.

Thank you for reading.