Good Monday morning. Last week, the UK imposed one of the strictest, most vague (and therefore overly broad) new laws around pornography in recent memory. Recording yourself having consensual kinky sex in private could come with jail time, as could watching other people do it. And sex workers are the ones to feel the repercussions of bad laws like these first, of course, with many reporting content disappearing from their online stores en masse. Keep reading to learn more about what it covers, and how creators are responding.
In the UK, Face Sitting Porn Might Land You in Jail
“I adore breath play. I love being strangled, suffocated and drowned, and I love strangling and suffocating others. Waterboarding: that’s my favourite,” Melissa Todd, a UK-based writer and sex worker, told me. “Many women do: it really isn’t only horrid men forcing us to do these dreadful depraved acts. Interrupting oxygen supply produces the most intense sensation of euphoria. I enjoy it in my private life, and I offer it in sessions too.”
Starting Friday, she and anyone else in the UK distributing or possessing certain types of choking, suffocation, breath play, strangulation and a bunch of other types of porn — even if it’s just recorded in the privacy of their homes and not for sale on a porn site — could face up to five years in prison.
This is, predictably, already a huge mess for sex workers. Adult creators watched platforms remove hundreds of their videos — even when the creators thought they were in compliance with the law. These creators say they were blindsided by the removals, since the content didn’t seem to violate the law at all. Creators are reporting one platform in particular, Clips4Sale, is purging content with little notice, “a precautionary measure,” with videos disappearing in the hundreds.
“Of course, we were all aware of the new Act coming in and prepared accordingly, but not for anything at this scale. We’ve had nothing since and they’ve been tweeting as normal,” adult creator Sophia Truee said. Clips4Sale launched in 2003 and caters heavily to fetish content. “It’s a huge blow to this area of the industry, and I can only hope things will be communicated soon. We, as creators, understand how difficult it is to be a content site in this current climate, but communication has not been prioritized,” Truee said, noting that this is happening right before the holidays, with Black Friday being one of the most popular times for creators selling content. “For many, this will be devastating, as over 20 years of the work will have just been wiped.”
MORE FROM 404
Important update for our RSS fans: If you’re a paid subscriber using our full text RSS feed and don’t want these newsletters included in your feed, you can now replace the feed’s URL, which usually looks like 404.feed.press/private?key=XXXX, with 404.feed.press/no-newsletters?key=XXXX instead. Questions? Reply here or email support@404media.co and we’ll try to help ya out.
Nevermind! Following widespread backlash, Meta announced last week it’s putting a planned update of its commercial terms of use on pause. The terms would have required business accounts to allow Meta to “use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta’s products. The new terms were initially set to go into effect on October 30, but after outcry from journalists and users who didn’t want Meta reaching far beyond Instagram and Facebook and into their websites to suck up their work as training data for its generative AI products, Meta announced it was pushing the change to November 20. Now, it’s on hold entirely.
Whoa, dude. Archaeologists discovered the oldest direct evidence of psychoactive cannabis use in a Siberian tomb that dates back 2,800 years and was the site of human and horse sacrifices. During excavations of the tomb, a team found more than 1,400 cannabis seeds scattered around the remains of several Iron Age individuals, and even identified cannabinoids—including the active compound tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)—in a person’s preserved hair. Though humans cultivated cannabis for many millennia before the Iron Age, this is by far the earliest clear-cut proof that the plant was consumed for its psychoactive effects, which have made it one of the most widely used drugs in the world today.
Source: 404 Media · 2026-11-09