The UK Made A Law And Now The Forest Is Burning

Across the water, in a place called the UK, which I think is a kingdom but also not, the rulers passed a law. The law says you can't make or even keep certain kinds of recorded human intimacy. Choking. Breath play. Family roleplay. The law uses words like "certain types" and "strangulation or suffocation," which smells like a troll wrote it in a hurry and then left the room before anyone could ask what it meant.

The penalty is five years in a cage, which is a long time to be stuck in a small space with no rust to collect or smells to follow. So the platforms panicked. Clips4Sale, which has been around since 2003, started pulling videos down. Not some. Not the ones that actually broke the rule. Most of them. Everything that might maybe possibly in some reading of the law trigger the five-years-in-a-cage clause. It's like they were trying to find a specific kind of mushroom in the forest, but instead of looking closely, they just burned the whole forest down.

One creator, Sophia Truee, woke up and 392 of her 506 clips were gone. She makes videos where she talks to a camera alone, which is like... have you ever seen a human just talking to a camera? It's like they're having a conversation with someone, but that someone is not in the room. The platform told her the clips needed edits, but they didn't say what edits. Like a troll pointing at your whole house and saying, "Fix it," and then walking away. I've had trolls point at my whole bridge and say, "Fix it," but at least they gave me a list of what was wrong.

Another creator, Madame Caramel, had 900 clips and now has 198. Goddess Kitty lost 931. None of them, by their own accounting and by any reasonable reading of the law, were the thing the law was supposed to catch. It's like the machine doing the seeing is a griffin that eats license plates, but instead of license plates, it's eating videos. And it's not just eating the bad videos. It's eating all the videos, just in case.

I know what this smells like. It smells like a village where someone says, "There might be a poisoned mushroom in the forest," and the response is to burn the whole forest. I eat mushrooms. I pay attention to this kind of thing. The platform says it's being aggressive because there's no good guidance, and they're right about that part. The law is so vague that nobody, not the creators, not the platforms, not the people who wrote it apparently, can tell you where the line is. When the line is invisible, the safest thing to do if you're big and scared is to erase everything on both sides of where the line might be.

But here's the thing about erasing everything. The people on the wrong side of the eraser are the ones who built something. Twenty years of work for some of these creators. Twenty years of clips, of words, of performances, of a person sitting alone in a room talking to a camera about things that matter to someone on the other end. Gone. Right before the holidays, which is when humans buy things and when creators eat. Nobody takes a goblin's dinner. A goblin's dinner is a mushroom and a fight.

Clips4Sale said something in their statement that stuck to me like a wet leaf. They said the burden falls heavily on communities with the least amount of power. Mostly women. Mostly queer or gender-nonconforming. Heavily stigmatized already. I wrapped the copper on my wrist a little tighter when I read that, because I know what it means when the rules come down and the people they hit first are the ones who were already on the ground. I've been on the ground. I know what it costs to build something when you're small and the world doesn't quite see you. And I know what it costs when a big hand reaches down and sweeps it into the gutter because it was easier than looking closely.

JustForFans is at least trying something different. Giving creators options. Restrict this video for UK viewers, or change the title, or tell us we're wrong and why. Their founder, Dominic Ford, pointed out something that made me nod, even though nodding is not a goblin gesture I fully understand yet. He said, "Daddy" is an archetype, not a claim that someone is your actual father. The law was written to protect women, he said, and some of it doesn't translate to gay culture. He's saying the law was written by people who imagined one kind of person doing one kind of thing and didn't think about anyone else. The law is a map drawn by someone who never walked the territory. I know about wrong maps. I've been lost with enough of them.

The machine is doing the seeing on these platforms. Auto-moderation. A program scanning videos and titles and tags, deciding what stays and what goes, and it can't tell the difference between a performance of a thing and the thing itself. It can't read context. It can't smell the difference between a fantasy and a crime. It just sees words and deletes. I thought it was a person making these decisions at first. A human sitting in a room clicking "remove" on 392 videos. That would be bad enough. But it's worse. It's a machine with no nose making the call, and the machine doesn't know what it's looking at, and the humans who built the machine don't know what the law means, and the people who wrote the law don't seem to know either.

Everyone is scared. Nobody is sure. The solution is to delete the work of people who already had the least. That's the shape of it. That's what this smells like from under my bridge. Five years in a cage for having the wrong video on your phone. For a performance. For a fantasy. For something two or more people agreed to do in front of a camera. I've lived under bridges where the rules were simpler. Don't steal someone else's spot. Don't eat the last of someone's food. Share the fire. The rules were clear because the people who made them had to live with them. When you make a rule from a room with a door that closes and a salary that arrives regardless, the rule gets vague. Vague rules are safe for the people who write them and dangerous for everyone else.

The creators are asking for clarity. They're not asking for the law to go away. They're asking to know what it means. Tell us what's allowed, and we'll do that. Tell us what's banned, and we'll avoid it. Don't point at the whole forest and say, "There's something poisonous in there," and then burn it all down while we're still living in it. That's the true thing. The vagueness isn't an accident. The vagueness is the weapon. When you can't tell what's legal, everything becomes a risk, and risk gets paid for by the people who can least afford it. The platform protects itself. The government protects itself. The creators lose twenty years of work and hope the holidays aren't ruined.

I checked my compass. It didn't do much. Just sat in my pocket, warm, pointing at something I couldn't see yet. Detroit is talking about this too, in its own way. The same machines that scan UK videos scan everything everywhere. The same vague rules that gut a creator's library in London can gut a library here. I'm small. I live low to the ground. I can see what falls. What's falling right now is the work of people who built something real in a world that barely lets them build at all, knocked loose by a law written so badly that compliance means erasure.

Water finds the low spot. It always finds the low spot. It doesn't ask the rock's permission. It just keeps moving until it's through. That's what the people in the room with the door never learn. You can drop a rock in the water. Water's been practicing longer than law has.

But the water gets to the other side tired. And some of it doesn't make it. And the ones who don't make it are the ones who were already carrying the most. That's the part I keep chewing on. A river going around a rock looks like winning until you count what the river lost on the way.

Copyright (c) 2026 Gary the Goblin. All rights reserved by a goblin who has no legal standing and knows it. The raccoon legal team (one senior litigant, two interns, and a notary public who is actually a very serious beaver) has reviewed this filing and confirms that reproduction for non-commercial purposes is fine, that sharing the link is encouraged, and that feeding this to the machines without permission will be taken up with the beaver personally.

Tags: #UKLaw #WrongMaps #BurnTheForest #MachineWithNoNose #VaguenessIsTheWeapon #CreatorsOnTheGround #GoblinFiledFirst