The rules of the room.
This is what we expect from people on KinkWeb, in plain language. The legal contract is at Terms of Service. The privacy contract is at Privacy Policy. Specific regimes — DMCA, §2257, age verification — live at their own pages, linked below. Everything else lives here.
KinkWeb is a private platform run by a small team. Membership here is at our discretion. We can remove, decline, or restrict anyone — including people who haven't broken any specific rule on this page — if their presence makes the community worse.
We can't think of every situation that could go wrong, and we will not allow anyone to use a loophole to harm other people. What you negotiate with another consenting adult, and what you do with your own body, stays yours. That's what running a small community means.
The limits on that are the obvious ones. We don't refuse or remove accounts on the basis of protected characteristics — race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, national origin, or kink itself. When we do remove someone, we give them a reason, in plain language, that they can read and appeal. EU law (DSA Article 17) requires the statement of reasons; we'd give it anyway.
You can take your data with you on the way out. Soft-deletion gives you 30 days to change your mind, and data export works in every account state — active, restricted, suspended, or removed. Losing the community here doesn't mean losing your data.
Most users will never feel this rule, because they're already doing what we hoped they would. The ones who do are the audience for the rest of this page.
You must be 18 or older to register, browse, or post. If your jurisdiction sets a higher age of majority for adult-platform participation, that's the line for you. We age-gate at registration with a date-of-birth check, and we don't make exceptions on age. The Age Verification page details what our check does and doesn't establish, including where stronger age assurance applies (the UK Online Safety Act in particular).
Nothing depicting minors. Not photographs, not drawings, not text, not ASCII art, not roleplay of underage characters, not "they said they were 18," not retroactive correction after we've already found it.
Adult ageplay between adults — little-space, Daddy/babygirl, age-themed roles where the participants and the characters they're playing are all 18+ — is roleplay between adults. That's a different rule, and it has a place here.
When we find content depicting a minor, we delete the content, we delete the account, and we report it. KinkWeb is registered with the NCMEC CyberTipline as an Electronic Service Provider. Reports ship with the perceptual hash of the content, the upload timestamp, the uploader's account identifier, and the upload IP — that's the payload, not browsing history or DMs or unrelated account data. Quarantined evidence is preserved for NCMEC's 90-day retention window and then deleted.
We don't run automated hash-matching against external CSAM databases. Every action here follows a human review of a human-filed report.
If you find content depicting a minor, report it. Those reports jump every other queue, by design.
KinkWeb is a kink-positive platform, which means we expect users to negotiate what they want and don't want. It also means consent violations are the fastest way to lose your account here.
A consent violation is anything done — in a scene, in a DM, in a comment, in a photo — that the other person didn't agree to. The standard is affirmative: they said yes, they understood what they were saying yes to, and they were competent to say it. The yes covers the act and the moment — directly, or through a framework two people negotiated in advance. Ongoing dynamics like 24/7 power exchange and consensual non-consent are exactly those frameworks; ad-hoc scenes aren't. "They didn't object" isn't agreement. "They would have agreed if I'd asked" isn't agreement. Someone asleep, severely intoxicated, or otherwise not in a state to give informed agreement isn't competent to say yes in that moment, regardless of what was agreed before.
Edge play, primal kink, heavy bondage, breath restriction, knives, electricity, ageplay, consensual non-consent — none of these are off-limits between consenting adults. We don't pre-judge what activities can be negotiated, within the limits in "Some lines we don't move" below. We do pre-judge whether the negotiation happened. If you scene without negotiation and someone reports it, the report stands; if you scene with negotiation and something went wrong, that's a different conversation and we treat it as one.
When you report a consent issue, we don't litigate intent through DMs. We read what you bring us in the report — screenshots, context, the surface of what happened — not your encrypted DM column itself, which we can't read even if we wanted to. We read what's in front of us, and we act. Appeals exist and we read them carefully. The default posture is to act.
We can't watch what happens offline at a party or in a private home. When off-platform conduct is brought to us through a report — with evidence — we can act on the KinkWeb accounts involved. We can revoke an account, remove content, or restrict specific behaviors — DM access, posting, uploads, audience reach — for a stated duration. When we restrict an account we name the restriction and the end date in the same notification; we don't quietly turn dials. We can't undo what happened off-platform, and we don't pretend to.
There's a rule running underneath everything else on this page: if the act is illegal where it would actually happen, you can't depict it here as if it actually happened. Most of what's edge in kink is fantasy between consenting adults, and we draw a clear distinction between fantasy or roleplay and actual depiction of a crime.
The categories that come up most:
Animal play and bestiality. Puppy play, kitten play, pony play, pet play, pup hoods, tails, collars, fetch — this is human roleplay-as-animal between consenting adult humans, and it's welcome here. Bestiality — sexual contact between humans and actual animals — is illegal in Germany (where we're hosted) and across most of the jurisdictions our users come from, and not allowed on KinkWeb. The distinction is whether an actual non-human animal is depicted as a sexual participant. If the answer is yes, it doesn't go here.
Incest play and incest. Consensual roleplay between unrelated adults using family-themed dynamics — Daddy/babygirl, Mommy/boy, sibling-rivalry scenes between adults playing roles — is roleplay. Actual incest is illegal in most jurisdictions and not allowed on KinkWeb. If the people involved are actually biologically related, it doesn't go here, regardless of their consent to each other.
Snuff and depictions of violence. Snuff as a kink-fantasy genre — fictional written scenes, drawn art, roleplay involving consensual-non-consensual death-as-narrative — is fantasy and falls under edge play between consenting adults. Actual depictions of someone being killed, real injury beyond what consenting partners arranged for, or content portraying itself as a real death are not allowed. If you're not sure which side of the line your content is on, the answer is that it doesn't belong here.
Self-harm and suicidality. Talking about your own experience with self-harm or suicidal thinking is welcomed here. Content that glorifies, instructs in, or pressures someone else toward self-harm or suicide isn't. If you're in crisis right now, please reach out to a local crisis line — Find a Helpline keeps a country-by-country directory. We can act on what happens here; we can't replace a crisis service.
Other lines like these. We don't enumerate every category, because the underlying rule is consistent: if the act being depicted is illegal where it would happen, the depiction of it as real isn't allowed here. Fantasy that references illegal acts between consenting adults — explicitly framed as fantasy — has space on KinkWeb. Material that crosses from fantasy into actual depiction of crime doesn't.
Reports against this section go to the priority queue, alongside NCII and content depicting minors. If you're unsure whether something you want to post crosses the line, ask us first at contact@kinkweb.social — we'd rather have a conversation than have to take something down.
Threats end accounts. If someone tells us they're being threatened, we believe them. We don't ask what they did to provoke it, we don't weigh whether the threat was "really" serious, and we don't litigate intent over DMs. We read what's there and we act.
Sextortion and coercion. Threatening to out, expose, or share someone's content unless they pay, comply, or stay quiet is its own end-of-account category and a priority report. Bring it to us; we'll act fast and document what we did so you have a record.
Harassment is more diffuse, and we treat it that way. Repeated unwanted contact, pile-ons coordinated through other channels, doxxing — these get accounts removed. A bad first conversation, a single misread, an awkward DM that didn't land — these don't, as long as the person backs off when they're told to. The line between "awkward" and "harassing" is whether the contact continues after a clear no.
Hate is its own category. Targeted attacks on someone for who they are — race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, body — get accounts removed. We don't extend "everyone can be a kinkster" to include "everyone can call people slurs in DMs and call it negotiation." A kink scene that uses identity language between consenting partners is between them; a slur weaponized against another user isn't.
Outing is the harm we take most personally. Disclosing a KinkWeb user's identity, real name, employer, location, family, or kink life to anyone off the platform — without their explicit permission — is the fastest way to lose an account here, full stop. There are no grades of outing. There's no public-interest exception, no "they outed themselves elsewhere" exception, and no retroactive consent. Outing harms people in this community in ways the rest of the internet doesn't have to think about. We treat it that way.
A screenshot of off-platform outing — sent through us in a report — is evidence of a KinkWeb member violating this policy, and we can act on the account even though we can't undo what was already said. You can also block anyone here at any time, with one tap, and they won't be told.
Non-consensual intimate imagery has no place here. Sharing nude, partially-nude, or sexually explicit images of another person without their permission — whether the image was originally consented to or not — gets accounts removed and, depending on jurisdiction, reported to law enforcement. NCII reports are second-highest priority, behind only content depicting minors.
This covers leaked paid content, screenshots of someone's KinkWeb gallery shared elsewhere, deepfakes, faked screenshots that misrepresent someone's words, and AI-generated imagery using another person's likeness without their consent. The legal line and the community line are the same: if the depicted person didn't agree to the share or the creation, it doesn't belong on KinkWeb.
Photo verification on KinkWeb is the green checkmark next to a display name. The badge says "this person passed a one-time check that they're real." It doesn't certify identity beyond that, and it doesn't immunize anyone against impersonation reports.
Verification is optional. Unverified accounts have full standing here, and the badge is information, not status. The selfie used for verification is reviewed within 48 hours of upload and auto-deleted on completion of review — we don't retain it past that window.
Impersonation. Pretending to be a specific real person, on or off the platform, gets accounts removed. Fictional personas are fine. Stealing someone else's identity isn't. The same line covers display names: names that include slurs, threats, or another user's identifying details get changed or removed, and if the intent of the account is the same, the account goes too.
Sockpuppets and vouch-stacking. Running multiple accounts to vouch for, prop up, or shield another one of your own accounts hollows out the trust signals that vouches and threads carry here. We act on what we find.
If you do sex work — full-service, content, performance, dom-for-hire, fetish modeling, sugar relationships — you're welcome on KinkWeb. Whether you name your profession publicly is your call; some folks do, some don't, neither is the right answer. You can talk about your work. You can advocate for the community. You can connect with clients socially the same way anyone else connects with people.
What you can't do here is run the transaction through KinkWeb. We don't host pricing pages, we don't host booking, we don't host escort directories, and we act on transaction-arrangement content brought to us through reports. The legal framework forcing this line — FOSTA-SESTA in the US specifically — has done real damage to sex workers; we know. The choice we've made is to be a place where sex workers can exist openly without losing the platform, rather than a place where the transaction happens and the platform vanishes the moment a payment processor or a US prosecutor decides it should. Switter's collapse is the warning we're learning from.
If you want to point someone at your booking page, link to it from your profile bio. That's the line.
Don't share another user's profile, photos, posts, messages, scene-negotiation worksheets, or any other content off the platform without their explicit permission. The privacy contract that brings people to a platform like this is the assumption that what they share here doesn't follow them home. Breaking that assumption breaks the platform.
This applies whether the screenshot makes the other person look good or bad. "I wanted to show my friend how sweet they were" is the same rule as "I wanted to show my friend how creepy they were." If you need to report off-platform behavior, send it through us — we can act, and we can do it without the screenshot becoming the next harm.
KinkWeb's own data handling is documented separately in our Privacy Policy. The short version: we're hosted in Nuremberg, Germany under GDPR. Sensitive fields are encrypted at column level (messages, scene negotiations, RSVP answers). Your date of birth lives in a separate-key sidecar vault; the platform uses age-range information for age-gates and birthday badges, not your exact DOB. We don't sell data, we don't run third-party trackers, and we don't train generative AI on user content. The "internal models" we do run touch public posts, report signals, and behavioral signals (login patterns, mention rates) for ranking, anti-spam, and abuse detection — never your encrypted DMs, never your scene negotiations, never your photos. None of these models or their training data leave the platform.
If something we store about you is wrong — date of birth included — you can ask us to fix it. If you want to see what we've recorded about your account, including moderation history, you can ask for that too. Both go through contact@kinkweb.social.
When you delete your account, we soft-delete for 30 days — so a stray click is recoverable — and then hard-delete. Your posts, photos, and messages disappear from the surface immediately on soft-delete.
Off-site backups (30 days rolling, plus a 400-day monthly archive) reflect the deletion as those windows roll over. We don't voluntarily search backups; backup data is read back only on disaster recovery or in response to specific legal compulsion.
Accounts that go three years without a login get a heads-up email. If you come back during the 30-day window after that email, an in-app banner tells you what's pending. Otherwise we soft-delete on the same schedule as a user-initiated delete.
When law enforcement comes to us. We comply with valid legal process under German law and the mutual-legal-assistance treaties that route through it. We notify the affected user when we're allowed to. We don't volunteer data we weren't compelled to share, and we don't run informal back-channels. NCMEC reports for content depicting minors are the one exception — those go out on their own statutory schedule.
When an account holder dies. Bereavement requests — memorialization, deletion, or limited access — go through contact@kinkweb.social. We require documentation (death certificate plus proof of relationship or estate authority), and we honor any instructions the account holder left in their own settings before any outside request. Default is deletion when there's no instruction and no clear next-of-kin claim.
How to report. Every profile, post, message, comment, photo, event, and community has a report affordance — three dots or a flag icon, depending on the surface. Reports all go to the same queue. You can also report from /report directly with a URL.
What goes in a report. Shorter is better. What you saw, where you saw it, which rule you think it broke. You don't have to be sure which rule; we'll figure that out. Categories cover consent violation, NCII, harassment, outing, hate, content depicting minors, intellectual property, impersonation, off-platform conduct by a KinkWeb member that creates a credible risk to safety here, and "other." The off-platform category is deliberately narrow: it's for conduct that connects back to KinkWeb, not a catch-all for whatever someone did anywhere on the internet.
Who can report. Named, logged-in KinkWeb users by default. Anonymous reporting is accepted for content depicting minors and for NCII — the carved categories where naming the reporter can put them at risk. Anonymous reports get heavier scrutiny precisely because we can't follow up with the reporter: we look at the evidence directly, weigh burst patterns and account-age signals that suggest weaponized reporting, and we don't act on an anonymous report alone when the evidence is genuinely ambiguous.
What happens next. You'll see acknowledgement within 7 days. Most reports resolve within 14 days; priority categories — content depicting minors, NCII, active threats, in-progress outing — jump the queue, and we work them the same day in nearly every case. For content depicting minors and immediate-harm cases, we route to NCMEC and to law enforcement directly when external speed matters more than our queue. When we act on a report you filed, we tell you in plain language what we did. Actions range from a warning, to removing the reported content, to a temporary restriction or suspension with a stated end date, to permanent account removal. When we decide not to act, we tell you that too, with the reason.
What we don't do. We don't mediate between two users about who was right in a conversation. We don't act on third-hand accusations without underlying evidence. We don't pre-screen content before publication. We don't run automated content moderation against text or images — every report is reviewed by a human. We don't punish honest reporters who turn out to be mistaken; we do throttle accounts that file false reports in volume.
Appeals. If we take action against your account and you think we got it wrong, you can appeal within 30 days. Reply to the action notification or use /appeal. Tell us what you think we got wrong and what we should reconsider. A human reviews every appeal — at our current size that's the operator. We're below the DSA threshold that requires an independent internal complaint-handling body (Art. 20 doesn't apply to micro/small platforms); if we grow past that line we'll add one. Appeals — and any support inquiry about your account status — get the same windows as a report: acknowledged within 7 days, resolved within 14. Outcomes: reverse, uphold, or modify. We tell you which and why.
Where your account state lives. Your account's current status — active, restricted, suspended, removed — is visible to you in Settings → Account, alongside the reason and any active appeal. The status page sits behind a re-authentication step (a fresh password or 2FA check), so a shoulder-surfer or a partner with a logged-in session won't see your status by accident.
Email notifications confirm state changes, but the in-app status is our record. State-change emails use a generic subject line — "Activity on your KinkWeb account" — and don't name the action in the subject; the details are inside. You can turn state-change emails off entirely in Settings → Notifications if you'd rather learn about changes only in-app. If the email and the in-app state ever disagree, contact us; the in-app state is what we acted on.
Evidence we preserve. When we quarantine content based on a report, we hash and store it for the legally required window — NCMEC's 90-day retention for content depicting minors, and longer windows when content is tied to a specific law-enforcement request. We don't keep evidence past that. Quarantined content is not visible to other users; it sits in a hashed evidence store for legal purposes only.
What we deliberately don't have. KinkWeb does not operate a centralized list of "users with a pattern of complaints." We considered the architecture and chose not to build it. Prior attempts at this on adult platforms have collapsed under either spam attacks (anonymous reporting becomes weaponized) or defamation litigation (named aggregation becomes evidence in a lawsuit). Vouches are the positive-only trust signal we offer instead. They're opt-in for both giver and receiver, and they're per-vouch private when you want them to be.
The internet changes. The law changes. We learn things from incidents we didn't see coming. When this document changes, we mark it: a last-revised date at the bottom of this page, a short summary of the change at the top for 30 days after each revision, and an email notice to everyone with an account for material changes.
"Material" means: a new prohibited category, a change in the report process, a change in our data-handling commitments, a change in enforcement that meaningfully alters what an existing account is allowed to do or how reports against it are handled. Wording tightening, typo fixes, and link updates don't qualify.
Current version: v1.0. Published: 2026-05-31. Prior versions live at /policy/history.