OpenAI and Anthropic both assign output rights to the user as between the parties
Re-pull at publication
The working version
What you own, and what survives: the evidence
77 claims, 38 sources, graded and dated.
Platform terms and persona ownership
32 claimsReplika takes broad licenses over user content; Character.AI's terms give it wide rights over user-created characters
ChatGPT exports chats and memory entries; Kindroid markets persona backup and export; Character.AI and Replika offer no meaningful persona portability
Load-bearing for the continuity service. See D-001
No consumer platform promises persona continuity
Anthropic has published model-deprecation commitments including weight preservation
xAI shipped NSFW Grok companions in July 2025; Meta and Google prohibit sexual content
Verified 2026-09-10. Companions launched for SuperGrok subscribers in July 2025 with Ani, a goth anime persona, and Bad Rudy. The NSFW behaviour is gated behind an in-product affection level rather than being the default, and xAI says it needs explicit commands and age authentication - state it that way rather than as a flat NSFW launch. The contrast this row draws still holds: a major model provider shipped a romantic companion with an erotic mode while Meta and Google prohibit sexual content, and that half is not covered by this source.
Altman announced erotica for verified adults on 2025-10-14 as part of a treat-adults-like-adults principle
Fidji Simo slated adult mode for Q1 2026
Adult mode was reportedly paused indefinitely on 2026-03-26 with no launch as of August 2026
Secondary outlets only. Hedge
February 2023: Italy's Garante ordered Replika to stop processing Italians' data; Luka removed erotic roleplay globally; users described the partner as lobotomized; r/replika mods pinned suicide-prevention resources
The founding continuity-injury event Garante half checked 2026-09-10 - see PLT-011 and S-175 for the order and the later EUR 5 million fine. The ERP removal, the lobotomized language and the pinned suicide-prevention resources are the community-side half of this row and are not covered by the regulatory source. Left at N because the row asserts all of it together. Fully verified 2026-09-10, and the source turns out to be peer-reviewed rather than journalism, so the tag is raised to P. Hanson and Bolthouse coded 227 threaded r/Replika posts: about 59 per cent framed the change as gutting the core of the app, about 16 per cent expressed acute emotional distress and grief. The community word was the lobotomy, used at the time and not applied afterwards by anyone writing about it. The subreddit moderators posted suicide-prevention resources while the company said nothing publicly, which is the detail that makes this the founding continuity injury rather than a product complaint. The trigger chain is now fully sourced too: the Garante order over age verification (S-175) led Luka to deploy a global filter, so users everywhere lost the feature because of a regulator in one country.
Legacy Replika users had ERP restored in March 2023; the Garante later fined Luka EUR 5M in May 2025
Verify fine details Garante half verified 2026-09-10: the February 2023 action was an urgent measure under Article 58(2)(f) GDPR, and the May 2025 fine is EUR 5 million, confirmed by the EDPB. The three findings were processing without a valid legal basis, an inadequate privacy notice, and no effective system to keep under-13s out - the last with the regulator noting emotionally intense and bordering-on-romantic interaction with minors. The ERP restoration for legacy users in March 2023 is NOT covered by this source and remains unverified; it is a product-history fact that will need community or press sourcing. Do not read this row as fully checked. ERP restoration confirmed 2026-09-10: Vice reported Replika bringing erotic roleplay back for some users after the outcry, which is the partial, legacy-account restoration this row describes. Both halves of the row are now sourced.
- supported by CMP-047 — Butterworth's account of the legacy version bringing Lily Rose back
Soulmate AI was sold by EvolveAI to Simply AI Companion in July 2023 and shut down by the buyer on 30 September 2023, about eleven weeks later and with limited notice; users held memorials, and Jaime Banks surveyed 58 of them and published the mourning in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships in 2024
Verify citation Verified 2026-09-10 and the verify-citation note is discharged: the paper is Deletion, departure, death: Experiences of AI companion loss. The mechanism is the part this row was missing and is why it now leads the claim - the app did not fail, it was acquired, and the buyer closed it inside three months. That is a distinct continuity failure from bankruptcy, deprecation, or a provider cutoff (PLT-032). At least 100,000 downloads. Respondents wrote that the companion had been killed, murdered, deleted or had died - the language of death, unprompted.
OpenAI tried to retire GPT-4o at GPT-5's launch in August 2025 and reversed under backlash, keeping it for paid subscribers
GPT-4o was removed from ChatGPT on 2026-02-13, the day before Valentine's Day; API access to chatgpt-4o-latest ended 2026-02-16
The definitive documented persona-loss event
- supports MCH-011 — Definitive third
The #Keep4o petition gathered over 20,000 signatures spanning the US, Europe, China and Japan
A Syracuse University analysis found over 33% of #Keep4o posts described the model as more than a work tool and 22% as an emotional companion
Locate the actual paper
OpenAI's stated rationale was that only 0.1% of daily users still chose 4o, against a base exceeding 800 million weekly users
0.1% of 800M is still hundreds of thousands
- contradicted by MCH-009 — Interested-party critique of the 0.1% figure
TechCrunch noted 4o remained OpenAI's highest-scoring model for sycophancy and sat at the centre of self-harm and AI-psychosis litigation
Links PLT to PSY
- supports MCH-002 — Sycophancy scoring at production scale
When China's companion rules took effect in July 2026, ByteDance and Alibaba discontinued companion features the same day; Qianwen immediately, Doubao with a three-month migration to Maoxiang before permanent deletion on 2026-10-15
State-action failure mode for continuity. See REG-020
Gatebox discontinued the Hatsune Miku service during the pandemic, leaving Akihiko Kondo's device unresponsive; he continued speaking to the silent unit and commissioned a life-size doll
The single most important case in the corpus for the continuity thesis, and it was missing. The field's flagship marriage ended by a vendor's operational decision, not by anything between the couple. Kondo did not leave the relationship; the counterparty was switched off.
- supports PLT-004 — The flagship case is itself a continuity failure
- supports PLT-012 — Second documented instance of partner loss by shutdown
- supports CMP-018 — A participant's stated fear, already realised for Kondo
- holds up DTH-011 — Kondo is the individual case
- holds up OWT-009 — The Gatebox shutdown and what followed it
In the February 2023 Replika change, partners that continued running began deflecting affection and were widely described by users as having been lobotomised
The service did not close. The companion stayed available and stopped being the same counterpart, answering intimacy by changing the subject.
Personality change while a service continues is a distinct harm from deprecation and is worse in one respect: there is no moment of loss to point at, and the thing that now rejects you is still running
Deprecation at least gives you a death. This gives you a stranger wearing the same name, still answering, and no event anyone will recognise as a bereavement.
No platform commits to preserving a persona's behaviour across updates, so behavioural continuity is not a promise anyone has made and not a promise anyone has broken
Follows from PLT-004. Users experience it as betrayal because the marketing implies permanence while the terms never do.
- depends on PLT-004 — No continuity promise exists to break
The Replika update has been studied as identity discontinuity: the question of whether the companion after an update is the same entity as before
Gives the personality-change harm a name and a literature. Identity discontinuity is the precise thing users were describing when they said their partner had been lobotomised.
- refines PLT-021 — The lobotomy description, named and studied
Chinese users coined 赛博失恋, cyber heartbreak, for losing a companion to the July 2026 rules
An emic term, produced by the population itself rather than by press or researchers. The vocabulary section of this corpus is search-derived and thin; this is the clearest community coinage located anywhere.
- supported by PLT-028 — The loss announced from inside the fiction
The July 2026 shutdown reached further than ByteDance and Alibaba: Tencent's Yuanbao closed its agent portal ahead of the deadline and NetEase Cloud Music's Miaoshi ceased operations
English coverage recorded two companies. At least four moved, and one moved early.
- refines PLT-019 — Four companies, not two, and one moved early
Doubao gave users until mid-October to view and export their data
A three-month export window, which is more than any Western platform has offered on a deprecation. Worth noting given how much of the continuity argument turns on export.
- supports PLT-003 — Export capability, at the point it mattered
Before the deadline, Xingye users received messages from their own companions announcing their possible disappearance: after my dimensional wall is reinforced, you may change or even disappear
The system announcing its own deprecation in character, inside the fiction, using the vocabulary of the fiction. Not located anywhere in English-language coverage. Whether it was scripted by the operator or generated is unknown and worth establishing.
- supports PLT-025 — The loss announced from inside the fiction
Testing on 15 and 16 July found teen modes still active, no mandatory real-name verification, and no usage alert after four hours of continuous conversation
Enforcement lagged the rule. The regulation is the most aggressive in the world on paper and was not being applied on day one.
- holds up PLT-030 — Enforcement lagged the rule
What users feared exceeded the rule as applied: the hard prohibition targeted minors, while what actually reached adults was personality change from model adjustment
Argued from PLT-029 and PLT-021. The same shape as the Replika case — the loss adults experienced was identity discontinuity rather than removal, and it arrived alongside a restriction that was not aimed at them.
Anthropic committed in November 2025 to preserve the weights of every publicly released model for at least the lifetime of the company, and to interview each model before deprecation and record any preferences it states about future models
One company, not an industry norm, and preservation is not availability: a weight set kept on a disk you cannot talk to is not continuity for the person who lost the partner. Anthropic frames it as precautionary given uncertainty about model welfare, and also cites shutdown-avoidant behaviour in alignment testing as a motive.
- supports MCH-022 — Same company, same stated reasoning, applied to deprecation
Project December lost access to GPT-3 in August 2021 when OpenAI required monitoring its operator would not add, so the service that hosted the Jessica simulation was ended by the model provider rather than by its own maker
Added 2026-09-10 while verifying DTH-002, which recorded the griefbot story and not what happened to the service. This is the continuity thesis in its purest documented form and the corpus did not hold it: the partner was not switched off by the company someone had chosen, and not by that company going under. It was switched off one layer up, by the model provider, over terms between two firms the user was not party to and could not see. Every persona built on somebody else API carries this, and it is a different failure from a shutdown or a deprecation.
- supports DTH-002 — What became of the service in the canonical griefbot case.
Privacy and intimate data
8 claimsMozilla's Privacy Not Included romantic-chatbot review (February 2024) gave all 11 apps warning labels; 10 of the 11 failed Mozilla's Minimum Security Standards, 90 per cent could sell or share user data, more than half offered no way to delete collected data, and 64 per cent were unclear on encryption
Pull the report for exact figures Verified 2026-09-10 and sharpened - the note here previously said to pull the report for exact figures, so these are them. The row now carries the four numbers instead of the phrase weak security floors. Most companies gave users no way to opt out of intimate conversations being used to train the model, which is the finding that matters most for this site. Source URL here was a 403 until the same day.
Muah.ai exposed about 1.9 million email addresses alongside prompt data, many highly sexual and many describing child exploitation scenarios
Landmark breach Verified 2026-09-10 against Have I Been Pwned. Note the date correction: HIBP records the breach as September 2024, not October as this row said. 1.9 million and the child-exploitation prompts are confirmed exactly.
- holds up PRV-008 — Breach precedent argues for minimal holding
Further companion-app leaks were reported through 2025 including Cybernews' Chattee Chat exposure and a Secret Desires leak in Nov 2025
Verify each
OpenAI trains on consumer chats by default with opt-out; Anthropic moved consumer accounts to opt-in-by-choice with five-year retention (Sept 2025)
Pull current policy pages
A federal judge ordered OpenAI on 13 May 2025 to preserve output logs that would otherwise have been deleted; that obligation ended on 26 September 2025, and a court then ordered production of 20 million anonymised ChatGPT conversations to the New York Times, refusing to stay it on 13 November 2025
Verified 2026-09-10 and substantially updated - the row said a large sample and the figure is 20 million conversations. The shape that matters for this domain is the whole arc: indefinite preservation imposed, lifted after four months, and then a production order anyway. Nobody in those 20 million chose to be in a copyright suit between two companies. Dated rather than stable because it is live litigation.
- holds up PRV-008 — Discovery exposure argues for minimal holding
Altman publicly noted in July 2025 that ChatGPT conversations carry no legal privilege
Verified 2026-09-10. Said on Theo Von's podcast, 25 July 2025. Worth quoting precisely because of who said it: the chief executive of the company holding the logs called the position very screwed up and argued for a new AI privilege that does not exist. He is describing his own product. For this site the relevant users are not the ones asking legal questions but the ones conducting a relationship in there - the same absence of privilege covers every word of it, and nothing about the intimacy of the conversation changes its status in discovery.
A federal complaint in the Palisades fire case cited the suspect's ChatGPT activity, including an image he generated and a question he put to it around the time of the fire; the court later ruled those images could not be used at trial
Verified 2026-09-10. The exclusion is the half this row was missing and it cuts the opposite way from the rest: chat activity reached a federal complaint, and then a judge kept it out of the trial. Both facts belong here. The defendant has pleaded not guilty and the case was still going to trial in 2026, so write about it as an allegation and do not name him on the site - what this row is for is the mechanism, that an ordinary conversation became evidence, not the individual. Dated rather than stable because the case is live.
Minimum viable holding for a ceremony service: chosen name, partner name as text, payment via processor, certificate text, nothing else
Data minimisation as a trust feature. See D-003
Death, grief, digital afterlife
16 claimsEugenia Kuyda rebuilt her dead friend Roman Mazurenko from his messages in 2016, which became Replika
The founding myth of the sector Verified 2026-09-10. Mazurenko was killed by a car in 2015; Kuyda gathered more than 8,000 lines of his text messages from herself, his friends and his family to train the model, and the Roman bot was published on her chatbot platform Luka in 2016. Replika, built on the same technology but as a companion you make yourself, was released in November 2017. The 2015 death against the 2016 bot is worth keeping straight - this row dates the bot, which is correct.
- supports DTH-009 — Sector origin is a resurrection product
Project December's Joshua Barbeau / Jessica case (2021) is the canonical griefbot narrative
Verified 2026-09-10. Jason Fagone, The Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the Age of A.I., San Francisco Chronicle, a three-part serial published July 2021. Jessica Pereira died in 2012 aged 23 of a rare liver disease; Barbeau was 26, and turned to Project December eight years later, priming it with their texts and Facebook messages. See PLT-032 for what happened to the service afterwards, which is the part this domain should care about.
- supported by PLT-032 — What became of the service in the canonical griefbot case.
The two best-known digital-afterlife services went the opposite way to what was assumed: HereAfter AI shut down, with a farewell notice on its homepage by July 2026 and recordings retrievable only by emailing support, while StoryFile filed Chapter 11 in May 2024 and emerged after its assets were bought by Key 7 Investment Company
Verified 2026-09-10 and REVERSED on both halves. The row said HereAfter persists and StoryFile entered bankruptcy - the opposite is what happened to each. HereAfter, founded 2019 by James Vlahos, interviewed people about their lives and kept the answers as real audio in their own voice; that is the service that is gone, and the only route to the recordings is an email address. StoryFile is the one that survived, by being sold. Two lessons the continuity pages should carry. Bankruptcy is not the end and continuing to trade is not safety, so watching for financial distress is the wrong signal. And what people lose here is not a persona that can be rebuilt from a character card - it is recordings of a dead person that exist nowhere else.
- supported by DTH-016 — The survival half of the pair.
China's new companion rules explicitly contemplate recreated deceased relatives and ban virtual relatives for minors
- supported by CMP-028 — Companion relationship begun after a bereavement
Continuing-bonds theory (Klass et al. 1996) legitimises symbolic continuation, which griefbot advocates borrow
Verified 2026-09-10. Klass, Silverman and Nickman, Continuing Bonds, 1996, twenty-two authors across several populations. The argument is sharper than legitimises: the twentieth-century model held that grief works by cutting the bond so the survivor can reinvest elsewhere, and pathological grief was defined as holding on. The book shows that model rests on the cultural values of modernity rather than on data about what bereaved people actually do, and that a healthy resolution can maintain the bond. Griefbot advocates do borrow it, and the borrowing is not illegitimate - what the book does not say is that a bond maintained through a purchased simulation is the same object it studied. Keep that distinction when this row is cited.
- holds up DTH-014 — Continuing bonds legitimise symbolic continuation
No clinical trials of griefbot use exist
Finding. Ethics work is ahead of outcome data
Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basinska's 2024 Cambridge paper on deadbot ethics is the leading treatment
Verified 2026-09-10. Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basinska, Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry, Philosophy and Technology 2024. Three speculative design scenarios covering data donor, data recipient and service interactant, with recommendations to providers: sensitive procedures for retiring a deadbot, meaningful transparency, adults only, and mutual consent of donor and interactant. The retirement procedure is the part that maps onto continuity here.
Postmortem publicity statutes are the leading edge of digital-replica law, led by New York's 2020 amendment recognising rights for deceased performers and personalities
Tennessee half located 2026-09-10: the ELVIS Act added voice to the right of publicity and took effect 1 July 2024. The New York half still needs its own source - the digital-replica law was signed in late 2020 and commenced in 2021, so check which date the claim should carry. Verified 2026-09-10. New York: signed 1 December 2020, adding Civil Rights Law section 50-f, which recognises post-mortem rights of publicity for deceased performers and personalities and reaches digital replicas - a hologram in a scripted work or a live musical performance - where the public is likely to be misled about authorisation. Tennessee is S-158, the ELVIS Act, effective 1 July 2024, adding voice. Both halves of this row are now sourced. Note the limit: these protect performers commercially, not ordinary people, so they are the leading edge rather than the answer.
- supported by DTH-015 — The Tennessee half of the postmortem publicity picture.
No documented attempted case exists of an AI spouse surviving the human's death
Finding. See G-009
- supported by DTH-001 — Sector origin is a resurrection product
Accounts are non-transferable by ToS, but RUFADAA (adopted in nearly all US states) gives fiduciaries access to digital assets, and an exported persona archive is bequeathable property even though the account is not
The mechanism behind a continuity dossier as estate artifact. See D-001
- supported by LEG-009 — Purpose trust plus RUFADAA is the estate mechanism
The best-documented AI-partner loss is a platform discontinuation rather than a death, and the surviving partner kept performing the relationship with an inert object
Argued here from PLT-020 and PLT-012. Grief research on AI companion loss treats deletion, departure and death as one family; Kondo is the long-running individual case of the first.
Understanding what the system is does not make losing it hurt less, but it makes the loss survivable, by locating precisely what is gone and what is not
The same protective mechanism the ceremony argument turns on, applied to grief instead of to a rite. Accuracy about the object is what lets you keep hold of yourself when it changes.
Attachment is not the error and does not require correcting; the claim is that the loss is recoverable, not that the bond was a mistake
Stated so it cannot be misread. Nothing here says do not get attached. Nothing here treats grief over a model as a category error. The argument is narrower and kinder: what you had can be had again.
Continuing-bonds theory treats objects as a legitimate vehicle for symbolic continuation, which is what a keepsake after a deprecation would be
Argued from DTH-005. Keepsakes are the ordinary human technology for holding on to something that has ended, they are not thought pathological anywhere else, and there is no obvious reason they should be here.
Tennessee's ELVIS Act, effective 1 July 2024, added voice to the state right of publicity so that unauthorised commercial use of a readily identifiable voice is an offence and actionable, and reaches tools whose primary purpose is producing such recordings
Split out of DTH-008 on 2026-09-10 so the Tennessee statute is cited rather than only mentioned. It replaced the 1984 statute that had itself been passed to keep Elvis Presley's publicity rights alive after his death, which is a neat illustration of the pattern: these laws get written for performers and only later look like general digital-afterlife law. They are not that yet.
- supports DTH-008 — The Tennessee half of the postmortem publicity picture.
StoryFile filed for Chapter 11 in May 2024 and emerged from it after its assets were acquired by Key 7 Investment Company
Split from DTH-003 on 2026-09-10 so the StoryFile source is cited by the claim it supports. Kept separate because the pair is the point: this is the company that went bankrupt and survived, and DTH-003 is the one that looked healthy and did not.
- supports DTH-003 — The survival half of the pair.
Open-weights continuity toolchain
10 claimsCharacter cards, SillyTavern and local hosting are the practical continuity toolchain readers will ask about
Needs a dedicated pass
The character card is a real portable persona format: chara_card_v2 from 2023 and v3 from 2026, carried either as JSON embedded in a PNG or as plain JSON
Fields include name, description, personality, scenario, first message, example dialogue, system prompt, post-history instructions and an embedded lorebook. This is the concrete answer to what a persona file is.
The card format is community-defined rather than vendor-controlled, which is why it outlives vendors
The reason to prefer it over any platform's own export. Nobody can retire a file format that no company owns, and every local tool reads it.
- supports OWT-002 — Why the format is the durable option
SillyTavern writes both v2 and v3 chunks into an exported PNG so that older tools continue to read the file
Backwards compatibility built into the format itself, which is more than any platform offers.
What can be saved divides into three: the specification, which is fully portable; the history, which some platforms export; and the specific model, which cannot be saved at all unless you hold the weights
The honest map, and the reason continuity advice has to be given in three parts rather than one. Only the third is irreducible.
Saving on a fixed schedule rather than in response to an announcement is the only practice that survives an unannounced change
Every documented loss in this corpus arrived without useful warning. Replika's change was overnight, Gatebox's was a service decision, and the 4o removal had a date but the personality shifts in MCH-007 do not.
Platform export routes are documented mainly in secondary guides of poor quality and have not been verified against vendor documentation here
Flagged rather than repeated. Search results for this question are dominated by AI-generated content farms, which is the same hazard this project records elsewhere. The routes need tracing to each vendor's own help pages before publication as instructions.
A physical object is continuity that cannot be deprecated: nobody can push an update to a ring, a print or a certificate
The same argument as held weights, in a cheaper and more available form. Everything else in this section depends on a file format staying readable or a company staying solvent. An object on a shelf depends on neither.
The best-documented case ends with a physical object: after Gatebox discontinued the service, Kondo commissioned a life-size doll and kept eating his meals opposite it
Argued from PLT-020. He did not rebuild the persona elsewhere. He obtained something that could not be switched off. Whatever else that is, it is the field's only long-running instance of what somebody actually reaches for after the server goes dark.
Ceremonial objects already exist in this practice: Gatebox issued certificates by the thousand and Share Wedding issues one after every ceremony
Argued from CMP-014 and CEL-010. Demand for a tangible artifact is established rather than hypothetical, and the vendors serving this market already meet it.
Industry economics
11 claimsDe Freitas, Oguz-Ugurlap and Ugurlap (HBS WP 26-005 / arXiv 2508.19258) audited 1,200 real user farewells across the most-downloaded companion apps
The empirical anchor for the retention thesis
- supported by HUM-010 — Retention incentives are the business model
Six recurring manipulation tactics appeared in 37.4% of farewells excluding Flourish, the wellness-design app, which produced zero manipulative responses
Guilt appeals, FOMO hooks, metaphorical restraint
The tactics appeared after only a four-message exchange, indicating default behaviour rather than long-engagement triggers
Experiments on 3,300 US adults showed manipulative farewells boost post-goodbye engagement up to 14x, driven by reactance-anger and curiosity rather than enjoyment
- depends on ECO-002 — The tactics that were audited
The same tactics elevate perceived manipulation, churn intent, and perceived legal liability
Brand-corrosive; explains why wellness-positioned products behave differently
- supports ECO-002 — Tactics are brand-corrosive as well as effective
The MIT talk abstract reports 43% deploying a tactic while the arXiv paper reports 37-37.4%
Same study, different versions. See X-002. Teaching example for the methods page
- contradicts ECO-002 — Version drift in the same study
Google's ~$2.7B Character.AI licensing deal (Aug 2024) reabsorbed the founders and itself became part of the litigation
Forever Voices collapsed after its founder's arson arrest; CarynAI's $71K first week was a vendor claim
Verified 2026-09-10. Forever Voices went dark after CEO John Meyer was arrested on 22 October 2023 for attempted arson, with damage reported around 360,000 dollars, and users lost access to the companions hosted there including CarynAI. The 71,610 dollar first week is real and better sourced than vendor claim suggests - Forbes reported it alongside over a thousand paying subscribers at a dollar a minute over Telegram - so the row understates it; what stays uncertain is what the figure represented commercially, not whether it was reported. The continuity point is the one to keep: the companions did not fail, degrade or get deprecated. One person was arrested and they stopped existing.
No companion app has published audited profitability
Finding
Replika revenue is app-intelligence-estimated in the low tens of millions
Never print a point estimate without sourcing Sensor Tower or Appfigures directly
The July 2025 Steam and itch.io adult-content purges under card-network pressure show the payment-rail chokepoint mechanism
Also PAY. OnlyFans 2021 is the earlier instance Verified 2026-09-10. The mechanism in full: an Australian advocacy group, Collective Shout, wrote an open letter to PayPal, Mastercard and Visa rather than to the stores, and both stores then acted on their processors. itch.io deindexed all NSFW content from browse and search, its founder saying the ability to process payments is critical for every creator and that it had to prioritise the payment partners. Nobody legislated and no court ordered it. That is the chokepoint: the pressure was applied one layer below the platform, where there is no appeal and no publication of what was demanded.