Adult Content Creator Network

Following Apple temporarily delisting Tumblr from their app store in 2018, Michael Kan (PC Magazine) writes about Tumblr's staff shut down thousands of creators' blogs, some intended for adult audiences as well as many blogs that were fully safe for work and compliant with Tumblr's TOS.

This is often considered the beginning of the crackdown on erotic art and pornography online, although it's far from the first incident of this nature. It is however one of the most notorious acts of restricting and/or censoring adult content creators.

“This is bigger than us & Patreon. It’s a world wide crack down on freedom of expression, on women, on marginalised people, on sex and sex work, on non conventional forms of labour that counter the status quo: the domination of corporations and patriarchy. On dissent,” - Vex Ashley, 2018

Samantha Cole (Motherboad, VICE) writes in 2018 about Patreon shutting down creator pages that they claim violate their terms of service. For one such creator, Patreon cited "public nudity" as the reason for the shut down, but the creator states that “there wasn’t a single nude body part showing that I would consider to be adult-orientated.”

Michael Kan (PC Magazine) writes in late 2020, following a New York Times exposé on non-consensual sexual acts, payment system corporations like VISA, Mastercard and later on, Discover, shuts down their services for PornHub.

“The casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible.” - Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, 2022

Michael Kan (PC Magazine) reports on rumors that Tumblr would reverse its ban on pornography, which turns out to not be the case. Corporations like VISA, Mastercard and Apple are shown to be the final arbiters on the matter in 2022.

Tyler Wilde (PC Gamer) reports in early 2025 that Zerat Games, developers of pornographic game "No Mercy," pulls their own game from Steam after the UK government investigates claims that the game violates the UK Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. The Act criminalizes the possession of "extreme pornographic images."

"Collective Shout may be sincere in their anger and desire to protect women and children, but it's not enough to say that certain topics are self-evidently unfit for representation in a work of fiction, and enlist vast financial corporations as enforcers - particularly when your choice of affiliations suggests you may have ulterior motives..." -Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, 2025.

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell (Rock Paper Shotgun) writes in detail about the 2025 restriction on sales of pornographic games on Steam and Itch.io as well as the organization that took credit for it.

In 2025 Patricia Hernandez (Polygon) reports on the unorganized call-in campaign that followed VISA and Mastercard's decision to restrict sales of pornographic games on Steam and Itch.io.