#Pornocalypse Comes To GoFundMe
Under fire from a variety of different directions, the crowd-funding platform GoFundMe, which had hitherto been one of the most relaxed of the crowdfunding platforms, just banned a whole raft of different types of fundraisers. This Washington Post article has the whole story. The part that’s relevant to the sex-positive world: as part of the changes, GoFundMe substantially beefed up its prohibition against fundraising that touches upon any of the adult industries. Here is what the GoFundMe terms of service had to say on the subject as of August 24:
You may not use the GoFundMe service for activities that … relate to sales of … items that are considered obscene [or] certain sexually oriented materials or services.
Pretty vague, and certainly GoFundMe was never adult-friendly. But the new terms they announced yesterday are rather more dramatically pronounced in their condemnation of porn and sex and anybody who admits to having anything to do with those things:
In order to ensure a positive experience for all visitors, the purpose of your GoFundMe campaign must not relate to any of the following items.
Adult Material
Sexually explicit
Sexually suggestive
Adult services or products
Pornography of any kind
Cosmetic sexual enhancements
Relating to adult industry
Content associated with or relating to any of the items above.
Of course that right there is a badly-written word salad that can mean whatever they want it to mean. But it’s very clear what they do mean: “No smut, and nothing to help smutty people. Go away, smutty people. Go far away.”
The Pornocalypse comes for us all, and yesterday it came for GoFundMe.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=12430
As a practical matter, might the decision be because adult-themed projects might need (not sure if for any legal reason) to be hidden behind a consent page, and that action is too large of a web-design undertaking?
Considering that it’s a trivially *easy* web-design undertaking, I don’t think so.
As bad as a pornocalypse is, anything and everything that some busy-body decides isn’t PC is subject to banning. The concentration of so much commerce into such few hands gives the busy-bodies well defined targets to concentrate their efforts on. This is bigger than porn.
Absolutely it is. Even the GoFundMe story is much bigger. But I *usually* try to stick to porn and adult stuff because that’s my beat as I see it.