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⚠️Important Information: Policy Livestream Write-Up 12th December 2025 ⚠️
🕑 Added 2025-12-12 19:29:16 +0000 UTCThank you for waiting on this write-up of Patreon’s policy live stream of Thursday, 11th December 2025.
As with previous write-ups, this report will summarise the hour-long stream, focusing on what may/will affect all Patreon users. The stream itself was pretty to-the-point but I’ve had to contextualise a fair bit, despite a lot of groundwork has already been established in prior live streams. As I mentioned in the past, Patreon has really improved its communications, alerting people 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.
Nevertheless, a link to the archived version of the live stream [EDIT 15-12-2025] is now viewable here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/2025-year-end-145701272
A text-only version of this write-up will be available in the archives; I’m just taking a fair few liberties here. This write-up was fairly difficult to get to a state I could post it on here without worrying about treading dangerous waters; a fair few topics discussed I’ve had to refer to euphemistically, so I hope you can understand the inference.
Note: This isn't me supporting or advocating such things, I'm just reporting what was said in the stream. You may feel differently but I'm erring on the side of caution.
That said, the stream was presented by the following:
In case the font is too small to read, they are Erin Han, vice-president of Trust and Safety; Courtney Duffy, now Head of External Affairs and Strategic Engagement; and Travis Reed, the Head of Policy Platform.
Policy proposals for creator consideration
The major incentive of the stream was to inform Content Creators of upcoming changes to the Community Guidelines, presently viewable here: https://www.patreon.com/policy/guidelines (correct as of December 2025)
These have not yet been implemented into policy, but it was stated that Patreon will duly inform everyone as such when the new rules come into play, via public posts and emailing Content Creators directly. This will happen next year. For now:
The main impetus for this was highlighted as follows:
This came up much later in the stream but as was discussed between some audience members, it appears Patreon has definitively drawn the line in the sand. I recall this issue first being bought up in late 2023, when certain Content Creators suddenly found their accounts terminated. The policy live stream I attended back then saw Patreon say (which still applies today):
So that’s that. Next slide appropriately titled:
To that end, the bulk of the live-stream focused on NSFW Content Creators, which they titled:
“Clarifying Expectations in Partnership with Adult/18+ Creators”.
It was stated that over the past few months, Patreon has hosted “Roundtable Sessions” with various such content creators, as illustrated in the following:
And so (I've had to recreate this next slide myself; the presentation was so visually bland I accidentially deleted my screencap of the original slide, mistaking it for a duplicate of another):
To expound, focus on... certain parts of human anatomy that may stimulate lower baser emotions should NOT be visible, including for illustrations. All public-facing images must be “Safe-for-Work” (so, no dôjin-style censor bars or scribbles; if you know, you know). To that end, they reaffirmed their stance and policy with artificially-generated images and videos, and what they want to do to enforce it via the Community Guidelines:
This is most likely in reference to major celebrities and public figures being confronted with such things, bringing this issue into very sharp relief in public consciousness (not to mention the countless ordinary folk who've had to unfortunately deal with retaliatory actions by such individuals). Interestingly, Courtney mentioned 18+ game content and how as long as it does not contravene the guidelines, then it was allowed on Patreon.
So obviously, not games glorifying... certain behaviours like that one game off of Steam I think earlier in the year? Anyway… moving onto the next slide:
Now, there was a bit of a debate about... the thing that snakes and magicians and the like are famous for. But I'm going to skip over that here. In short, Patreon's stance is as illustrated above, ipso facto. Other definitive stances were illustrated in the next slide as follows:
On that vein, the final slide for this portion illustrated:
Curious they accepted artificially-generated content in some capacity and before the stream properly started someone asked the valid question of:
Is Patreon implementing AI content moderation more widely like YouTube or using more of a user-reporting system?
In relation to YouTube reportedly coming down hard on AI-generated content-farm slop (you know the kind, right?) channels. Alas, this wasn’t answered.
But I suppose the way the wind is blowing given that a certain mega-corporation just did a deal with a generative-AI-thingamajig (same night), it makes sense for there to be an adoption of AI-generated content in some form… whether that’s right or not is a conversation for another time and space.
Still, Patreon said…
Policy Team’s focus areas for 2026
Namely:
I couldn’t note down all the organizations Patreon were working with fast enough but Hope Not Hate and the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (or CCDH) were definitely two of them. Patreon was also involved in a lot of political policy-making in the European Union (EU), with Courtney having returned to the US after spending the last week at Middle Tech. I’ll expand upon this in the next section as there is a lot of context required.
Presently, it was stated that Patreon’s next Transparency Report would be due out in March 2026, the third of its type. Namely:
Now, to expand upon what I stated earlier about what Patreon was doing in the EU, this was under
“Additional Developments”
I didn’t note down as much as I should but as I understand it, Middle Tech, both its mainland European Continent original: https://middletecheurope.eu/ and its UK counterpart, Middle Tech Coalition: https://www.middletechcoalition.com/ (since technically speaking, the UK is no longer part of the European Union following the Brexit vote of 2016), exist to try and act as a bridge between internet-based companies with a large user base (think Dropbox, Discord, Reddit, Yahoo, Dailymotion, TripAdvisor, and of course Patreon itself) and the politicians who are quickly sweeping in new laws and policies that have an effect on users.
Without delving too much into politics, I’m sure we are well aware of the various regime changes affecting how the online world works; I can’t provide an exhaustive list here, but verification, identity and safety, especially concerning social media, are all hot-button topics affecting law and policy, irrespective of geography; more information is catalogued here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_laws_by_country
Small and mid-range companies are very concerned about their ability to exist online, as well as how their users are able to access and use their services without geo-blocking portions of the world off (case in point: image-hosting site, Imgur, which is now no longer accessible from the UK).
To quote Middle Tech itself:
Positioned between tech giants and smaller start-ups, its members believe that a level playing field fosters consumer choice and empowerment, greater innovation and growth.
So via this, Patreon has been an active participant in attending E.U. Policy-Setting Agenda conferences that would enact digital regulation in Europe that would affect it and other online services.
The upcoming Digital Fairness Act (more information about this here: https://www.digital-fairness-act.com/ but in short, it serves to counteract the “gameification” of commerce via false-urgency limited-run merchandise – especially those pushed by social media influencers – and gambling-adjacent features in video games, like gacha games), and the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act (more information on that here: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai) to name but two major examples.
This raised some very valid concerns about political developments affecting Patreon and the domino effect of that trickling down into policy-making but I’ll address that in the Q&A section since there was one uniform answer.
Moving onto safety of… err, the next generation (let’s go with that), Patreon is:
TL; DR – computer wizardry making it harder for bad people to upload bad things, in theory.
As for the acronyms listed in brackets (parantheses) on the slide, they're all non-profit organisations who are dedicated to protecting the next generation from seeing, accessing and... participating in content that I'm sure we all agree is immoral. I won't elaborate further.
In relation to financial safety, Patreon is:
The stream then moved onto the Questions and Answers.
Questions and Answers
As is the norm for these reports, I’m going to combine and condense these questions and answers as a fair bit was said, but also repeated, which frustratingly ate up a lot of time that could have otherwise been spent on answering other questions.
This was the question asked, but over the course of the stream, some of the audience went into horror stories of their posts getting flagged and then their getting in trouble.
The response to this was that:
The Trust and Safety Team take a “blended approach”, and nothing is 100% perfect. So whilst there are machine-learning models trained to look out for certain words or phrases or content, humans are investigating the flagged content and will contact Content Creators directly. Some use templates (which has fed into the automation theories) but there will be always checks and balances made by humans, and Content Creators have the opportunity to appeal via the Appeals Process. However, regarding obvious and extreme forms of contravening content that, NCII-trained bots will review these without any human input, for the safety and wellbeing of staffers.
This then led to a bit of a debate in the chat regarding certain predilections. Funnily enough, this was one of the pre-submitted questions (which I shan't repeat here but mostly ends in 'dom' and one party obeying another), and the response was:
Colloquial terms [referring to that kind of content] aren’t ban-worthy as long as the context doesn’t contravene biological ties or other legal statuses (such as offspring related by marriage)
So that’s that.
The next question expands on something I raised much earlier in this report, namely:
The outright answer was no.
There was a bit of an in-joke from one audience member citing the “Harkness Test”, which comes from a meme stemming from the Doctor Who character, Captain Jack Harkness. You can look it up for yourself, but there is the contentious issue of “well, how anthro does something have to be?”, which has been a running debate for years, especially with fantasy or mythological creatures that are otherwise almost ‘feral’ like dragons, gryphons and hippogriffs for example. Some are just animals (albeit fantastical ones), others are kind of a halfway house between human and feral (like the Minotaur, depending on the interpretation)…
The hosts said that from the Trust and Safety Team’s perspective (and I’m summarising here), they would have to look at things in context and ask is it bipedal, wears clothes, more humanoid in its appearance, can it talk? And so on and so forth. The general rule of thumb seems to be, the closer to a human that something is, the less likely you’re going to get flagged for it, other guidelines permitting of course. One audience member strongly disagreed at the very end of the stream but that was that.
The next question, which I’ll bunch together with another similarly themed one asked, was in relation to some very valid concerns about political influence and discourse affecting Patreon and its policy-making. Namely:
There’s a lot more to it than that, but I’m not based in the US and this is not a socio-political channel. I can only report on the facts that are relevant to the live stream.
For those outside the UK, the Online Safety Act was a law passed in 2025 by the UK Government, putting pressure on various internet services to prevent the widespread distribution misinformation, disinformation, and harmful and illegal content, especially if… hmm, impressionable minds can access such material. More information about it here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act-explainer/online-safety-act-explainer
That said, the firm response from all three hosts was that:
Patreon won’t bow to political pressures, US-based or otherwise; their objective was on preventing harm to anyone on the platform and that whoever’s in power in whatever part of the world shall not dictate how Patreon’s Trust and Safety Team operate.
Careful negotiation through a very rapidly-developing changing landscape and seeking valuable user input every step of the way to preserve human rights, free expression and creativity was their priority.
Legislative proposals are being closely monitored and Patreon has been an active participant in digital policy-making both within the US and abroad, with the wide array of Content Creators potentially affected by these changes in mind.
Most of the recently passed legislation regarding changes to online platforms were actually prepared for in advance by Patreon over the past few years and the Community Guidelines echo or run in tandem with these new laws, such as identity verification of Content Creators, and monitoring what is publicly accessible without the pay wall.
UK-based Content Creators will not be individually targeted by Patreon in response to the Online Safety Bill based on geography alone, and the UK law places the burden on Patreon and other online services operating in the UK to comply, not UK citizens directly.
The response was:
…for the moment was that Patreon does not any anticipate any impending changes that would affect Patreon’s ability to process payments.
Patreon in fact has enabled direct-to-bank-account transfers for non-USA-based Content Creators earlier in the week; I was emailed about it myself. They’ve yet to update the Help Centre as of writing this (Friday 12th December 2025) so I’m unable to link it in this report. There were some other valid issues raised by audience members, but the hour was up and the stream ended.
As illustrated abovem For the next week until 18th December 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
I have no access to this myself, so I cannot report findings there. And as I’m no longer on social media, I cannot accurately report on any further developments someone else may have posted.
Still, Patreon can be contacted for further information; various means to do so are here: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042749811-How-to-contact-Patreon-Product-Support
Or by email here: CreatorPolicy@Patreon.com
If there’s anything I missed, or you just want to view the event for yourself and arrive at your own thoughts and conclusions, you can via this link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/2025-year-end-145701272
Thank you for reading.
Comments
Allan Meyer
Thank you for sharing, yet again. We will see how the various shadow bans, actual bans and inverse censorship by payment processors play out. Pay tree on likes to say the right words, the ground continues to shift globally, and I'll believe it when I see it.
