Patreon: Child Porn Allegations & Security Team Firing

Patreon have recently gotten flack for dismissing their entire cybersecurity team, but now social media is alive with allegations of Patreon knowingly enabling child sexual abuse material (CSAM) creators to proliferate on their platform for over a decade, and that the firing of the security team is somehow directly connected to it.

** This is a developing story and this article will be updated regularly, we have expanded on the original article since it was first published.

If you have any information about this story, please contact us.

On January 8th Emily Metcalfe, a Senior Security Engineer at Patreon, posted on Linkedin, alerting the infosec space to the fact that Patreon had seemingly, and somewhat surprisingly, just dismissed its entire cybersecurity team. Patreon later confirmed that they had laid off the team to Zack Whittaker of Techcrunch.

“As part of a strategic shift of a portion of our security program, we have parted ways with five employees,” said Patreon in an emailed statement attributed to the company’s U.S. policy head, Ellen Satterwhite.

This of course prompted a lot of debate within the information security community, especially when it became clear that Patreon had surprised the security team with this move, according to insiders, Patreon has no plan in place to replace the security team, despite Patreon insisting it was part of a bigger strategy.

But then even more sinister allegations began to emerge that the security team had been dismissed because they had pushed back against Patreons alleged internal policy to not remove illegal child porn activity unless they received a court order or law enforcement request (this allegation came from an anonymous source).

Worth noting that these employee reviews allegedly come from former members of the Trust & Safety Team at Patreon, not their security team.

The Glassdoor Allegations

This allegation on the Glassdoor platform suggests that the firing of the security team is connected to illegal activity at Patreon, this posting was allegedly made by a former member of the Patreon Trust & Safety Team. It is worth noting that Glassdoor does not verify employees who post reviews about their former employers.

This second review from a former employee, allegedly another member of the Trust & Safety team, confirms that the team knows all about the allegations.

If half the unanswered allegations of child porn for sale on the website are true, we're going to be in a lot of trouble.

Patreon has denied that these reviews from former employees are legitimate and called them fake, they have also told journalists that they are working to have them removed from Glassdoor. They will however have a much harder time cleaning up their Trustpilot review page as you can see below.

Patreon Trustpilot Child Porn Allegations

On Trustpilot, hundreds of users have been complaining that they reported child porn they found on Patreon, but were ignored and many had their accounts suspended. If you scroll down through Patreon's Trustpilot reviews page, it is littered with complaints about child porn reports going ignored and those who report them having their accounts suspended, this seems to have been going on for years.

Patreon Child Porn (CSAM) TikTok Allegation

The video below was posted on TikTok by a user called TizzyEnt in which he drew attention to the disturbing nature of child porn complaints he had been investigating, and how Patreon had been dealing with them by ignoring them.

@tizzyent

THE PATREON PROBLEM VOL 2 Thansk again to @mom.uncharted and also @Ben Hughes 🏳️‍🌈 for calling this out as well.

♬ original sound - TizzyEnt

One of the Instagram accounts focused on minors he is talking about in the video is this one which is 'supervised by her mother' and which advertises 'never published pics' to its 175 thousand followers, pointing them to a Patreon page that very recently seems to have deleted lots of its content. We reached out to Tizzy for comment and had a long conversation with him, he thinks the term "Managed By Mom" is both a dog whistle for paedophiles and a way for creators to skirt around Patreon's 18+ rule.

The Mom Uncharted Child Abuse Image Allegations

Tizzy was actually trying to draw attention to another TokTok user called Mom Uncharted who had been trying to raise the alarm for a while, in a series of TikTok videos she explains how she has been reporting these accounts trading in child porn for some time, and Patreon has reviewed them and told her that there isn't a problem because the accounts are managed by adults, despite them containing underage content and warning subscribers that they must be over 18 to view that content.

@mom.uncharted

@patreon Please explain how this content is available on your platform #protectthechildren #socialmedia #onlinesafety #parentsoftiktok #fyp #patreon

♬ Say So (Instrumental Version) [Originally Performed by Doja Cat] - Elliot Van Coup

Patreon Has A Troubled History With CSAM Creators

This isn't the first time that Patreon has been in the news because of creators on their platform monetizing extremely disturbing content, there have also been persistent allegations that Patreon has systematically failed to deal with this issue for years.

A simple google search reveals articles as early as 2017 discussing how Patreon and their CEO knew that creators were monetizing rape content, paedophilic animations, and other CSAM content that has somehow been allowed to remain on the platform.

On the Patreon Developers platform, you can find developers talking about how they have reported illegal content and child sexual abuse material but their reports had been ignored. This has clearly been an ongoing issue, as I have delved deeper into this, I keep seeing this same complaint repeatedly from multiple people.

I found child pornography being sold on Patreon and I reported it to their staff ; however, every single report and e-mail that I sent them has gone ignored.

Mass Petitions To Stop Patreon Monetizing CSAM

There have been petitions signed by tens of thousands of people to try and persuade Patreon to top creators producing pornographic child rape animations, and there have been multiple attempts in the creator's community to draw attention to this festering sore on Patreon, but we still see CSAM creators being allowed to continue leveraging Patreon as a way of attracting customers to their wares while Patreon has allegedly ignored the reports and complaints about this activity over a decade.

Somehow the story does not seem to have made it through to the mainstream media. I have spoken to multiple people who have been telling journalists about what is going on at Patreon for years, and they have been ignored, so coverage of this scandal so far has primarily been limited to social media and people's blogs.

In my view, Patreon has had a long time to get to grips with the issue of CSAM content that technically doesn't break the law and has failed to challenge creator's building businesses around CSAM content and attracting large, male, patron followings.

Patreon Child Porn (CSAM) Creators

There is something very wrong with these Instagram and Patreon pages, the people behind them are obviously organized. They immediately rebrand when they are sometimes taken down on social media and have new accounts set up and ready to go for when this happens, indicating the operators are organized when it comes to mitigating the risks involved in monetizing Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM) online.

They pose as 'family' pages, managed by moms with most of their content focused on one child in highly suggestive poses while wearing skimpy clothing, or they produce graphic sexual animations featuring children engaged in sexual acts. The nature of the content is deeply disturbing and is clearly designed to attract paedophiles, yet this lewd content somehow remains within the bounds of acceptability on Patreon.

In our opinion, these creators are using their Patreon pages as a 'shop front' to attract potential customers who can be 'qualified' before being moved onto a more private platform to conduct transactions with more illegal materials. The creators sail close to the wind when it comes to questionable content on Patreon, but stop just short of showing outright illegal content that would cause them to be banned, enabling their shopfronts to remain open and continue attracting subscribers.

We don't know why Patreon tolerates creators focused on content involving minors on their platform, the obvious answer is because they generate revenue for the company.

Patreon's Statement About CSAM/Child Porn Allegations

An unnamed member of the Patreon team posted this blog post a few hours ago in response to the allegations swirling around social media, below is a screenshot of the main body of their post addressing "dangerous and conspiratorial disinformation". The gall of these people is incredible, they obviously have a major problem on their hands with both legal and illegal CSAM content, and they choose to double down on their line that they forbid it, while ignoring the actual allegations.

They say that they forbid creators from monetizing content focused on illegal sex themes, despite hundreds of allegations on social media and websites to the contrary saying that they allow this to happen and that they ignore reports on this activity.

I also think that there is a much wider problem than the obviously illegal child porn content that has been found on the platform, lots of these creators are using content featuring minors which doesn't break Patreon rules in order to attract their patrons. Mix these groups together on one platform, the dubiously legal creators and the creators selling illegal child sex abuse images, and you have a problem over at Patreon.

Their second statement is a little muddled and rushed, it seems to be saying that the recent firing of the security team is "completely unrelated" to the work undertaken by the Trust & Safety team, completely ignoring the fact that security teams and trust and safety teams talk all the time in the real world. If the security team did not know about the CSAM issue, it would be surprising to say the least. Let's wait to hear from them.

But that is neither here nor there really, the real issue is the CSAM content, and Patreon has known that creators were monetizing this content for years.

My View On The Matter

Their statement isn't good enough, it does not address the allegations, and this needs to be properly investigated by members of the law enforcement community.

In my opinion, Patreon has completely failed to confront and address these persistent CSAM problems, instead, they have cloaked themselves in associations with child protection groups while knowingly enabling these creators to monetize CSAM content.

I have discovered hundreds of allegations going back a decade, different glassdoor posts from former employees talking about child porn, and hundreds of Trustpilot reviews from Patreon users saying that they have reported CP and been ignored, in many cases those reporting CP had their accounts suspended. I have spoken to a number of people who have told me that they have repeatedly tried to report what looks like organised CP rings on Patreon, only to be ignored time and time again, I even found a grassroots petition signed by 95k people who were desperately trying to persuade Patreon to stop monetising CSAM content on their platform.

The allegations all point toward an internal policy of not moving against CSAM creators unless the police became involved, despite the complaints and reports. It is only a matter of time before a whistleblower steps forward and blows the story wide open.

Creators & Patrons Cancelling Their Accounts

It is clear that creators with a presence on the platform, and their patrons, are not happy about the allegations or the subsequent statement from Patreon. Some of them have deleted their creator profiles in protest, in fact, my own non-profit is one of them.

Patrons are beginning to cancel their subscriptions, giving the allegations and the news about their security team as a reason. I was chatting to Jack Rhysider and he shared with me the screenshot you see below and gave me permission to share it, patrons of the Darknet Diaries are cancelling their subscriptions over the affair, you can read the reasons they are giving for cancelling below, this is costing infosec creators who have nothing to do with this affair real money in cancelled subscriptions.

This is a developing story, real facts are still thin on the ground, but wild allegations of illegal activity and child porn are everywhere, we will update this story as and when they emerge, with links to the original sources. Worth noting that some journalists are advising that reporting on this story is irresponsible, but I would argue that we have a right to know what is being said about what is happening at Patreon.

What do you think?