A 2023 year-end update from the policy team

Guidelines facelift

Patreon recently introduced new features to help you strengthen your relationship with your fan community and build a more sustainable creative business. The Patreon Community Guidelines are being updated accordingly to ensure that they address these new features, have language uniformity in terminology and tone, and are properly organized into easy-to-navigate categories. If you have any ideas or questions, feel free to reach out! And keep an eye out early next year for the finalized updates.

Update on age verification of Adult/18+ creators

Patreon’s payment processing partners require Patreon to verify that all creators who share sexually explicit work, or work that includes nudity, are over the age of 18. In response to creator feedback about making the age verification process more inclusive, Patreon has begun allowing Adult/18+ creators to age verify with alternative, non government-issued ID. In October, these creators were given a full month to notify the policy team if they’d like to go this route.

Note that if you are an Adult/18+ creator with a government-issued ID, you can still verify in minutes with Jumio (Patreon’s secure third-party vendor) via the Adult Content section of your Page Settings. Patreon’s full set of features and creator tools — including Free Trials and community chats — only become available to Adult/18+ creators after completing this process.

All Adult/18+ creators who haven't completed the age verification process yet will be required to do so within the next few months.

Transparency report

Patreon’s inaugural transparency report, which will cover all of 2023, will be published in the first quarter of 2024. This report is full of data and context around how Patreon addresses illegal, harmful, or otherwise violative activity, and will hopefully help ensure that everyone on Patreon can better understand and trust the systems in place to keep creators and their communities safe. If you have specific topics you’d like this report to cover, the Policy team would love to hear from you!

Protecting creators’ work from artificial intelligence scraping

This year, more than 3,000 creators shared with us the impact of generative AI on your creative businesses. One of creators’ top AI-related concerns relates to intellectual property; informed by this input, Patreon has taken steps to protect creator works on the platform. Starting with OpenAI, among other prominent generative AI companies, Patreon is blocking the scraping of pages for information and creative works to be stored and used to train, or feed, machine learning models to produce works that share the style or likeness of creators’ works without their consent. New risks emerge every day as the capabilities of generative AI evolve; Patreon will continue to learn and listen to creator concerns, and we are committed to taking actions to address them throughout next year.

Join the conversation

Livestream: You’re invited to join members of the policy team for a livestream on Tuesday, December 12 (12:30 PM PST // 3:30 PM EST // 8:30 PM GMT). When you RSVP, you can also submit any questions you’d like the team to address. If you’re unable to join live, a recording of the event will be emailed out afterwards. Note that the live stream will take place in English.

Discord: For one week after the live stream, the policy conversation will continue in a dedicated Q&A channel on Patreon's Creator Community Discord. Visit #policy-live-qa to join the discussion (open until December 19th at 9:30 AM PST // 12:30 PM EST // 5:30 PM GMT.)

Email: Questions or feedback? Reach out at [email protected]

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Your needs, wants, and thoughts are always top of mind when it comes to improving Patreon’s policies. Look out for more chances to talk policy next year. Until then, take care, and feel free to reach out at any time.