Patreon's Flagged Words

 There are certain words that will trigger this warning on Patreon:

So far the ones I found are porn, spanking, cum, orgasm, cumming, anal, blowjob, adult movie, and there are likely many others. This has affected the text in a few series, especially the "image plus story" panels of Naked Adventure. Raffle is also not allowed (but sweepstakes is). Cunt is allowed (lol).

There was one scene in particular where Lori said, "Well I guess we could always do porn." And that entire 2000-word story triggered the content detector as the post being in violation. It was an innocent statement of sort of a hopeless existence, and I had to change it to "erotic films." There was another scene where one of them said an enemy was going to get a good spanking, not even in an erotic sense, and that got flagged.

Now, this is only on image descriptions only, if I post these words into a text only post I get no warning:

I showed this to our team writer and she gave me this 1000-mile stare and asked me for a clarification on what they see as right or wrong. The words are allowed in a text post (or maybe the filter is not turned on for that type of post entry). I don't know why? Are there different rules for literature than images? There is no guidance.

The words are allowed on Amazon and Blogger.

The words are in a dictionary.

She asked me, "Can I post the same erotic fiction epub file on Patreon as I do Amazon?"

I said I don't know.

I mean, if it is good enough for Amazon, it should be good enough for the entire damn Internet because at this point they are one in the same. AWS or Kindle store, it is all the same system, and those text and image files on the cloud are scanned a billion different ways each and every day by their content moderation systems.

I have no doubt.

To be fair, putting a word like this in a post flags it for content moderation and does not mean an instant ban, but I end up avoiding using any of these terms at all. I understand the platform has likely had abuses of the system involving these words in the past, but I still feel the chilling effect on what I create. I am not afraid of moderation because I follow the rules, but I never met a moderation system for a platform that provided clear and consistent rulings. So I avoid the matter entirely, but I have nothing to hide.

I rarely use these terms, or if I get the flag, I change them.

Deviant Art has a policy against "explicit speech" as well but no AI driven tools to detect it, you just get flagged by drive-by users and then are subject to inconsistent moderation. I feel if they read half of the stories on there a lot more would get taken down, but nobody does nor do I feel anybody cares about text-only content.

As I have experienced, there are different rules for illustrators than there are authors on every platform I have been on. Even Apple allows sexually explicit books, and at one time they outright said if you want to product that sort of content, don't make a game or picture book, write a novel.

So that is why we say novels are this team's ultimate end should the images and stories we make get banned elsewhere. As for what types of graphic novels Amazon sells, well, a good number of those would fall way outside Patreon's community guidelines, but that is a different story.

EDIT: Add masturbation to the list.