Unannounced and vague rule changes vex models

One piece of the fallout from the Pornhub / New York Times debacle that has directly affected models doesn’t involve Pornhub at all. Banks have been reviewing the merchant accounts of user-generated content sites in the adult industry and cracking down on content that they consider inappropriate. Unfortunately, sites have not been clear in communicating some of these changes to models, leaving them confused when content is removed for “violation of terms” when the content had previously been okay – and in some cases where the terms have not changed, or models were not notified of changes. Additionally, sites that do communicate new content rules often do so in a vague or confusing way, leaving models on their own to determine whether or not their content violates new rules. Not only does this lack of clear communication affect existing clips on these platforms, but models have to worry whether or not clips they shoot in the future will even be allowed on the site. Let’s take a look at what 3 sites have done recently:

Manyvids

Manyvids has been deleting videos left and right, without providing much information to models other than “against TOS”. Many of these videos have been up for years, selling several times, with no issues, leading models to think they’re fine – right up until the videos are deleted. Often videos are deleted seemingly randomly, with other similar videos by the same performers left in place. There are new banned words, too, which models only discover when they attempt to write descriptions for videos. The banned words often directly contradict existing categories, making it even more confusing for producers. For example, the word “urine” is now banned, but the “pee” and “toilet fetish” categories remain intact. Models who have reached out to support often discover that Manyvids is now applying extremely strict rules to certain categories without advising models who post in those categories that there have been any changes:

Clips4Sale

Several weeks ago, fetish clip site Clips4Sale removed a variety of categories (mostly related to bondage scenarios such as “Damsels in Distress” and “Bound & Struggling”) with no notice to the performers and studios affected by the change. Then on January 19 they put a message on the studio admin page (messages are displayed when you log in) that there were updates to the “no non-consensual activity” and “no hateful content” rules. The new rules around hateful content appear to completely ban the blasphemy fetish content that is popular on the site, and make any religiously-inspired content a possible violation of a rather vague rule.

Niteflirt

Phone sex site Niteflirt has recently announced that any performer using the term “teen” on the platform – whether in profiles, listings, content descriptions, or even user names – must specify that the teen in question is 18 or 19 years old. Niteflirt informed models with a banner message on their admin dashboards which specified the date by which the term needed to be updated, as well as the date when Niteflirt would begin purging non-compliant profiles and content. Although there was some confusion amongst models about how to properly specify age to comply with the requirements, Niteflirt both notified models, and did it in advance of the change taking place – considerations that other sites have not extended to their performers.

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