Where the scene went when Instagram pushed it out

By Other Nights. Last checked 2 September 2026.

By Other Nights. Last checked 2 September 2026.

UK kink and fetish events now list in five main places: organisers' own websites, FetLife's city event pages, LGBTQ-friendly ticketing such as OutSavvy, the rave platforms DICE and Resident Advisor, and newsletters. The Other Nights index tracks 169 event series from 45 verified organisers across 24 UK cities, starting with kink events in London.

How the scene ended up spread across those five places is a record of two Instagram ban waves and one platform protest.

What happened on 21 June 2023

On 21 June 2023 Instagram deleted an estimated 45 or more sex-positive and kink accounts in one wave, including Klub Verboten, UK Fetish Archive and Cybertease. Dazed, reporting on 29 June 2023, wrote: "It's estimated that over 45 accounts in total were impacted by the crackdown."

Karl, Klub Verboten's founder, told Dazed: "Digitally and mentally, we died that day." He put the scale of one deletion at "the disconnection of 70,000 community members for Verboten alone".

Affected members organised the Stop Deleting Us campaign and planned a protest outside Meta's London headquarters for 4 July 2023. Dr Carolina Are, a Northumbria University researcher quoted in the same piece, said: "Meta does have a track record of over-moderating and over-censoring sex, particularly as opposed to violence and harassment." On what a deletion costs beyond reach, she said: "There's people that have built memories and networks through those apps which can't be rebuilt in a space of a day."

Many of the accounts came back within days. Dazed reported that Karl's @klubverboten and Douleur's @slut.social had been restored by the time it published on 29 June, and Fast Company reported restoration after six days under the #StopDeletingUs campaign. The Fast Company page returned a 403 when we tried to re-verify it on 2 September 2026, so the six-day figure is carried from our earlier source note rather than re-checked.

The 2025 wave was bigger and harder to appeal

A second, larger Meta ban wave ran from late May through July 2025. Automated moderation wrongly suspended thousands of Instagram accounts at account level, some labelled with child sexual exploitation flags on innocent content. Meta acknowledged a "bug". Appeals returned near-instant boilerplate rejections (SFist; Tech Issues Today). Which UK kink organisers were caught in this wave is not stated in the coverage we found.

If Instagram banned your event account

Two patterns show up in the documented cases. In 2023, restoration came in about six days, after the Stop Deleting Us campaign had formed and a protest outside Meta's London headquarters was already planned. In 2025, individual appeals produced near-instant boilerplate rejections, and Meta put the suspensions down to a bug. None of the sources we checked documents a reliable individual appeal route.

What the ticketing platforms say in their rules

Eventbrite's Community Guidelines do not say these events are banned outright. They say, under Nudity or Sexual Content: "In some jurisdictions, when content may not be suitable for all audiences, we may make the content private or otherwise reduce its distribution or prominence." The list that follows that sentence begins with "Events that focus on adult sexual activity, such as sex or kink/fetish parties, classes and workshops where active participation in sexual activities is required or expected". The same section separately prohibits "Explicit content about sexual fetishes". Wording verified on the page on 2 September 2026.

We found no confirmed mass removal of UK kink organisers from Eventbrite between 2024 and 2026. What we could document is the policy wording above plus organisers ticketing elsewhere: A Glimpse of Kink lists on OutSavvy, an LGBTQ-friendly ticketing platform. Whether that move was prompted by any Eventbrite decision is not stated.

The problem predates both Instagram waves. In February 2020 The Drum reported that Killing Kittens, then at 180,000 members, had been shut out across mainstream digital marketing: Facebook and Instagram removed its adult-oriented accounts, it could not use PayPal, and Google's Ad Accelerator rejected it at the compliance stage. The company responded by building its own ad-supported media platform. Hadleigh Bolt, its chief operating officer, told The Drum: "As soon as you hit anything that's semi-adult, you can't do anything that you know works on digital".

The default fallback has moderation problems of its own

FetLife remains the default insider discovery tool. Events are browsable by city under Places and Events, and the UK Fetish Events page on Facebook supplements it. Since August 2025, though, the platform has faced a moderation protest of its own.

#WhatTheFet was started by the Substack writer Captain Chaos, FetLife username theescorpiosiren, after she was put in timeout for screenshotting a harassing DM while the account that sent it stayed up. According to her Substack, Deviant's Domain, the protest grew from Black women sharing stories of bias and unprotected harassment. Its first action was a 24-hour mass account deactivation on 26 August 2025, alongside a change.org petition demanding accountability, transparency and community safety. Her position, in her own words: "We are done asking nicely".

A 30 September 2025 update reported a full month of silence from founder John Baku and announced two escalations: status-only posting every Tuesday in October 2025, styled NoTittyTober, and a 72-hour platform deactivation from 31 October to 2 November 2025 paired with a letter-writing campaign. The organiser's own account was later locked without a cited violation or appeal route. The protest's status after November 2025 is not stated in any source we found. We also found no UK press coverage of it; the story exists in depth on one Substack and one petition, so treat the detail as attributed rather than independently confirmed.

The complaints are visible off-platform too. FetLife holds a 1.4 out of 5 rating on Trustpilot, where a 14 January 2026 one-star review complains: "Platform deleted my old account because it was forcing me to verify my account with my ID". Multiple 2026 reviews describe lockouts and arbitrary moderation.

Where to find fetish events in the UK now

The newsletter route shows the limit that runs through all of these options. Big Clit Energy's advice to readers is trial and error: "As you can tell, all of these parties have a different vibe so it's worth checking them all out to find which ones are your favourites!" None of the sources above compares crowd, price or door policy across nights.

On Other Nights, the organisers named in this article are indexed with their current dates. Klub Verboten's London parties (play parties) and its Verboten Social nights are listed, and its Manchester dates appear under kink events in Manchester. Torture Garden's Halloween Ball and Killing Kittens' Hedonism White Party are indexed too. City pages also cover kink events in Bristol, and the full citywide calendar sits at what's on in London. For a first outing, one option is a beginner-friendly meet-up in a pub (munch).

Every listing links straight out to the organiser's own page, and every row in the index was last verified on 1 September 2026.

Sources and what we checked

• Dazed, Serena Smith, 29 June 2023. The 21 June 2023 deletion, the over-45 estimate, the Karl and Carolina Are quotes, the Stop Deleting Us campaign and 4 July protest plan, and restoration of Klub Verboten's and Douleur's accounts by publication. Fetched directly 2 September 2026.
• Fast Company. The six-day restoration figure, cited via our research file; the page returned a 403 on direct fetch, 2 September 2026.
• SFist and Tech Issues Today. The May to July 2025 Meta suspension wave, via our research file. Checked 2 September 2026.
• Eventbrite Community Guidelines. Policy wording verified verbatim on the page, 2 September 2026.
• OutSavvy organiser page for A Glimpse of Kink. Checked 2 September 2026.
• The Drum, Katie Deighton, 20 February 2020. The Killing Kittens lockout and the Hadleigh Bolt quote. Checked 2 September 2026.
• Deviant's Domain on Substack: the 8 August 2025 post, the 30 September 2025 update and the account-lock post, plus the change.org petition. The #WhatTheFet timeline, attributed; no mainstream corroboration found. Checked 2 September 2026.
• Trustpilot reviews of FetLife, January to July 2026. Checked 2 September 2026.
• sexualbeing.org, the UK Fetish Events Facebook page and Kinky Tiger's calendar page. Where insider discovery happens now. Checked 2 September 2026.
• Big Clit Energy on Substack, 4 January 2025. The London party list and the trial-and-error advice. Checked 2 September 2026.
• DICE and Resident Advisor listings. Scene events ticketing alongside ordinary club nights. Observed 2 September 2026.
• Venuva, observed 2 September 2026; fetish.events failed DNS lookup the same day.
• The Other Nights index: counts read 2 September 2026; every row last verified 1 September 2026.