Kickstarter Rolls Back Its Mature Content Policy After Outcry

Kickstarter has retracted the new set of rules around mature content that it released last week, following an outcry from creators whose campaigns are affected by the change. While the platform still allowed “romance and spicy literature, including comics” under that policy, it enforced stricter rules around pornographic and sexually explicit content. Now, Kickstarter has admitted that the response it got from its community let it know “loud and clear” that the crowdfunding platform got it wrong, so it’s going back to its previous rules. 

It explained in its announcement that it updated its policy because of Stripe, its payment processor that operates under its own set of rules. Kickstarter explained that over the past few months, it has seen a growing number of campaigns that it had already approved get suspended by Stripe mid-funding due to their nature. 

The platform would advocate for affected creators whenever that happened, and it was able to get Stripe to unfreeze their funds and to continue accepting money on their behalf so they could finish their campaigns. However, Kickstarter wasn’t always successful in getting Stripe’s decision reversed. It thought that the best path forward was to “close the gap” between its rules and Stripe’s so that creators would only have one set of rules to deal with.

“That was the intent, but the decision we made was an abandonment of the core counterculture, f*ck the establishment spirit of Kickstarter, and it left our community vulnerable,” it wrote in its post. 

Under its previous rules, which have now been reinstated, pornography and illegal content are still prohibited. But the rules are less restrictive, as they’re more “bare bones and not as specific.” Kickstarter said that Stripe can still suspend campaigns due to their nature, but it promised to advocate for creators and to help them make adjustments to make their projects acceptable to Stripe. The platform called it an “imperfect temporary solution,” so it could still implement changes surrounding mature content in the future. 

Kickstarter isn’t the only website affected by payment processors’ policies. Last year, Steam also started banning games that violate the rules and standards of “payment processors and related card networks and banks,” which affected titles with adult themes. Years before that, credit card companies Mastercard and Visa blocked the use of their cards on Pornhub and even severed ties with the advertising arm of the adult website’s parent company MindGeek.