“We have to have free human expression in some capacity”: Patreon CEO shares frustrations about getting adult content past payment processors

Patreon CEO Jack Conte has shared his views on the difficulties of working with payment processors and networks such as Stripe and Mastercard, who have the power to enforce their ideas about ‘adult content’ on stores and platforms by threatening to stop processing customer transactions. As boss of one of the biggest crowd-funding outfits, he’s keen to support artists “who are on the edges”, but also claims that the likes of Patreon have minimal “leverage” against the payment networks. It’s a useful bit of context for the on-going crackdown on NSFW games on Steam and Itch.io.

To catch you up, Steam and Itch changed their policies about “adult-only” content last year, explicitly giving banks and payment processors a say over what counts as acceptable NSFW material. A swathe of delistings and deindexings followed, with Itch especially shedding thousands of listings overnight. Australian lobby group Collective Shout have claimed credit for persuading the banks and payment processors to bully Steam and Itch into line, but using ‘financial deplatformisation’ to quash ‘taboo’ material is a gambit that goes back many years. Payment partners nudged Patreon to carry out a similar wave of suspensions in 2018.

A lot of game developers use Patreon, including behemothic names such as Dwarf Fortress developers Bay 12, and promising newer outfits like the creators of Paralives. There are still a lot of ‘adult’ game developers on Patreon, though outright pornography and/or depictions of “sexual activity between real, adult participants” are forbidden. Patreon’s community policy on the subject is quite in-depth, when compared to Steam’s wincing catch-all ban on “certain kinds of adult only content” and “content that is patently offensive or intended to shock or disgust viewers”. It mentions specific bodily fluids and defines “visible states of bodily arousal”. Is… is Patreon’s community policy document itself pornographic?

Speaking to The Verge’s Nilay Patel in a lengthy interview, Conte offered a quick history of Patreon’s wrangles with payment providers over the definition of acceptable ‘adult’ material. “There was not a way to push back in the early days,” he said. “I think we’re far enough down the road now. I sent many 3AM emails to CEOs, begging for them to reconsider.”

“Of payment partners and processors,” he qualified, when asked if he’d ever sent one of those 3am emails to the CEO of Stripe – who control an estimated 22.3% of the payment processing software market. “Actually, never Stripe, but other payment processors. And that was a real challenge for us, Nilay. If they’re threatening to not be a partner to us anymore, then it’s not just that one creator’s income that’s at stake. It’s the $10 billion that we’ve processed on behalf of creators since the company was founded. We’re processing over $2 billion a year now. That’s a lot of income that we need to be a rock for those creators, and make sure that that income is protected for them. And so, these issues are really serious.”

Over the years, Patreon have “co-iterated” on content policies with the payment processors “to understand their content policies and their constraints, and make sure that our content policy was acceptable to them”. Conte stressed that Patreon’s stance on ‘adult’ material is always changing, not least in response to new technology such as current generative AI tools.

“Content policy is a living, breathing thing,” he said. “It has to change as culture changes, it has to change as the internet changes. Now, there’s nonconsensual, AI-generated nudity. That was not a thing that platforms and payment processors had to worry about four years ago. Now, you have to worry about it, and you need a clear policy around it. So, one is, we worked with those partners to make sure that we had parallel content policies.”

Patreon’s other approach has been to build a “hot-swappable payments architecture”, allowing them to easily “unplug” processors who don’t want to work with them. “And what that did is, it gave Patreon a little bit of leverage—not a little bit, a lot of leverage, in those conversations,” Conte went on. “Because we’re processing billions of dollars annually, and those processors want that volume. If we can hold back volume from them because we’re not happy with their content policy decisions, that helps us. That helps us fight on behalf of our creators and have the right content policy that we want for us. It gives us some negotiating leverage in those conversations.”

The limits of that leverage become plain when the actual banks, or owners of the banks, behind the payment processing networks try to push a store or platform into being more restrictive. “This stuff goes all the way up the chain,” Conte said. “I wish it didn’t work this way, but this is how it works. So, we’ve had to both be more collaborative, and also build some systems that give us more agency like this swappable payments architecture, to solve that problem over time.”

It sort of feels like Itch are currently where Patreon were a few years ago, in terms of how much they’re actively negotiating with payment processing networks. They’ve recently begun looking for new payment processors who are more comfortable with adult material.

‘Financial deplatformisation’ is generally presented as a way to prevent the circulation of actively harmful sexually explicit materials, such as recordings of child sex abuse, together with more nebulous ‘glamorisation’ or perpetuation of sexual abuse in culture. It also very often often functions to enforce socially conservative norms around sex and sexuality, though many payment processors appear to be acting largely out of anxiety about possible lawsuits and reputational damage. Over the past two years, many queer developers have seen their livelihoods endangered by what is functionally a form of censorship.

Of Patreon’s stance on adult material at large, Conte insisted that “we have to have free human expression in some capacity”, making reference to the political metaphor of the Overton window, which describes the range of subjects people consider acceptable at any given time.

“So, we allow nudity,” he said. “There are marijuana creators, and there are people who talk about whiskey, there’s all kinds of stuff. I want that stuff on Patreon. I want artists on Patreon. I want people who push the edge. I want people who expand the Overton window. I want people who are out there. I don’t want people who are just in the center of the bell curve. I want the people who are on the edges. Those are the people who push society forward.

“In some ways, we have a liberal content policy, and that’s important to me on some dimensions. I want all those things. We’ve built policies to allow for those things, and now we have the payments architecture to support it as well.”