Every Platform Wants to Decide What You Can Read
You'd think choosing where to read fiction online would be simple. Find a platform, find a story, read it. But in 2026, every major platform has decided it gets a vote on what you're allowed to find.
Not what's illegal. What makes them uncomfortable.
Amazon: The Silent Purge
Amazon KDP is the biggest self-publishing platform in the world, and it has been quietly deleting erotica for over a decade. Authors report losing entire backlogs — dozens, sometimes over a hundred titles — removed overnight with nothing more than a vague email about "content guidelines." No specifics. No explanation of which passages or themes triggered the removal. No meaningful appeal process.
The guidelines themselves are deliberately unclear. Amazon won't define where the line is. Authors who try to re-upload corrected versions risk having their entire accounts terminated. One wrong guess and your publishing career on the world's largest bookstore is over.
The worst part? It's inconsistent. Traditionally published novels with identical themes stay on the shelves. The rules apply differently depending on who you are and how much money you make Amazon. An indie author writing taboo fiction gets deleted. A Big Five publisher with the same content gets a pass.
And you can't even advertise. Amazon won't allow ads for anything categorized as erotica. Neither will Facebook or Instagram. So even if your book survives the content review, good luck getting anyone to find it.
Wattpad: AI-Powered Censorship
Wattpad recently rolled out an AI moderation tool to scan its entire library. The result has been chaos. Books that follow the platform's own content guidelines are being shadowbanned — removed from search and discovery — without any notification to the author. Stories are deleted with no explanation, and appeals take nearly a month to process, if they're granted at all.
It gets worse. Multiple users have reported that LGBT content is being disproportionately flagged. One author found that of their 80 romance stories, all 50 straight romances were untouched, while 26 of 30 LGBT romances were shadowbanned. The AI doesn't understand nuance. It just flags and buries.
Wattpad received over 150,000 reports related to sexual content in a single year and closed nearly 27,000 accounts. Their content policy explicitly bans depictions of incest, bestiality, and necrophilia in fiction — not images, not real acts, but fictional written stories. Turkey banned the entire platform in 2024 for content the government found objectionable. And Wattpad's response to all of this pressure has been to crack down harder, not push back.
Barnes & Noble: The Quiet Burial
Barnes & Noble introduced an "erotica content" designation that hides flagged books from their public website. There's no clear definition of what qualifies. Authors aren't told their books have been flagged. The books just quietly disappear from search results. You can still find them with a direct link, but nobody browsing the store will ever see them.
This is the most insidious kind of censorship — the kind that doesn't look like censorship. Your book still technically exists. It's just invisible.
Kobo: Death by Tabloid
In 2013, a UK tabloid ran a sensational headline about self-published erotica on Kobo's platform. Kobo's response? They pulled all self-published titles from their UK store. Not just the ones the tabloid complained about. All of them. Romance authors, mystery writers, children's book authors — everyone got caught in the blast radius because Kobo panicked.
WHSmith, one of Britain's biggest booksellers, shut down their entire website rather than deal with the controversy. Amazon and Barnes & Noble quietly removed titles too. Years of an author's work, gone because one newspaper wanted a scandal.
The Pattern
Every platform follows the same playbook. Content policies start broad and reasonable. Then someone complains. Then the platform overreacts. Then the policies get tighter, the enforcement gets more aggressive, and the authors who are most vulnerable — indie writers without the backing of a major publisher — get squeezed out first.
The platforms aren't making these decisions based on what's legal or what readers want. They're making them based on what's easiest. It's easier to delete a book than defend it. It's easier to shadowban a story than explain why fiction is allowed to be uncomfortable. It's easier to build an AI that flags anything sexual than to hire humans who understand context.
And every time they make the easy choice, the range of stories you're allowed to read gets a little narrower.
What Readers Deserve
Readers deserve platforms that trust them to make their own choices. Not platforms that pre-filter reality based on what some content policy team in a corporate office decided is acceptable this quarter.
If a story is legal to write, it should be available to read. The decision about whether it's worth reading should belong to the reader — not an algorithm, not a content moderator, not a tabloid editor looking for clicks.
That's what we're building here. A platform where the only filter is the one you set for yourself. Where authors don't have to wonder if their work will be quietly deleted next Tuesday. Where the content policy is simple: if it's legal fiction, it has a home.
The platforms have decided they get to choose what you read. We disagree.