The UK law of 6 November: what changes for a tube or cam affiliate site

From 6 November 2026, possessing or publishing pornographic images that realistically show strangulation or suffocation, sex between relatives, or adults playing children under 16 becomes a criminal offence in England and Wales. A site that only shows embeds, thumbnails and cam widgets is not out of the picture: if a visitor in London can open a page called /tag/choking, you are making those images available to them.

The work this week is narrow. Find these three themes in your tags, titles, thumbnails and niche pages, and take them out. You do not need to copy the 17 categories a clip store removed last week, and you do not need to close your UK traffic.

What the text actually says

The offences come from the Crime and Policing Act 2026, which received Royal Assent on 29 April. The government's guidance lists three kinds of image:

• one person strangling or suffocating another. Strangulation "generally means one person applying pressure to another person's neck", and suffocation means depriving someone of air in a way that affects their breathing.
• penetrative sex between people who appear to be related, or who pretend to be. Close blood relatives are covered whatever their age. Step and foster relationships are covered when one of the two is, or pretends to be, under 18.
• sexual activity where one person is, or pretends to be, under 16, which is the adult roleplay case.

The test is the eye of a reasonable viewer. If the people look real, the image is in scope, and the government's factsheet says that includes realistic AI-generated images. Drawings and obvious animation are not what the text aims at.

The penalties are up to two years for possession of the first two kinds, three years for the third, and up to five years for publication. The guidance also lists defences, the one that matters to a webmaster being that you had not seen the image and had no reason to suspect it was covered. Possession is described as a continuing act, so material already on a disk or in a cloud account has to be gone before the 6th.

What it does not say

It does not contain a list of categories. Facesitting is not named, nor is any fetish by its trade name. The 17 categories iWantClips announced it would remove for UK buyers, from breath play to jeans facesitting, are that store's reading of the risk. It sells files to people in the UK, it had customers who had already paid for them, and it chose to cut wide.

It does not say anything about embeds, links or iframes either. Publication is defined broadly, as "giving or making an image available to another person by any means", with uploading, posting and sharing as examples. Whether an iframe pointing at another domain counts is a question the guidance leaves open, and nobody can answer it for you before a court does.

And it is not the Online Safety Act, even though the two now touch. The factsheet says the three offences become priority offences under that Act. For a service where users post content, that means risk assessments and proactive removal, with Ofcom fines up to £18 million or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue. A tube that publishes its own pages from feeds is a publisher, and its own exposure is the criminal offence above.

Why an embed site is still in the picture

Look at what your page actually serves. The video plays from someone else's server, but the thumbnail is often copied to your own storage or your CDN, the title sits in your HTML, and the tag page that groups thirty of these scenes was built by your theme. Each of those is an image or a description that you made available.

The defence of "I had not seen it" also weakens fast. A feed that drops a scene into your site at three in the morning is one thing. A niche page you configured, with its own title and its own place in your sitemap, is a choice that you made with your eyes open.

So the practical reading is the cautious one. Treat what your domain shows as what your domain publishes, whatever server the video bytes come from.

The clean-up, in the order we would do it

1. Tags and categories. Search your taxonomy for choking, choke, strangle, strangulation, breath play, breathplay, suffocation, smothering, hand over mouth, asphyxiation. Delete the terms rather than hide them, so the tag pages disappear with them.
2. Titles and descriptions from the feeds. Tube feeds bring their own titles, and those titles say exactly what the scene is. Run the same words over the text of every imported video, not only the tags.
3. The family vocabulary. Step roleplay between adults stays legal. Blood relatives do not, even between adults who are only acting, and a step scene becomes a problem when it also says teen, schoolgirl or high school. Search for the combinations, not for "stepmom" alone.
4. The pages that remain. Removed videos and deleted tags should answer with a 404 or a 410, and leave your sitemap, otherwise search engines keep sending UK visitors to them for weeks.
5. Cam widgets. Room titles and tags are written live by the performers. Most programs filter their own feeds, but check what your widget shows on the tags you just cleaned.
6. Your own disks. Old downloads, test imports, a thumbnail folder from a migration two years ago. Possession counts, and it counts from the 6th.

Geo-block the UK, or remove everywhere

Blocking UK visitors from a list of tags keeps the rest of the world untouched, and some large sites will do exactly that. It also means a second version of every page, a cache keyed by country, and the certainty that some UK visitors arrive through a VPN or a cached copy anyway.

Removing the themes everywhere is simpler, and the cost is only the tags you just listed. Several sponsor programs already ban strangulation and incest wording in their terms, and payment processors are not more relaxed. For a site that lives on its UK visitors, it is the cheapest way to be done with the question.

What we did on Jimp

On 2 November we took strangulation, suffocation, breath play, smothering and facesitting off every Jimp site, in every country. Facesitting is not in the text. We removed it anyway, because a reasonable viewer could see suffocation in some of those scenes, and because our sites are served from an edge cache that does not split by country. The filter reads titles, tags and categories, a video it catches disappears from listings, and its page answers that the video is unavailable. Nothing needs to be done on your side.

None of this is legal advice. If you produce content, host uploads from users, or run a large UK audience, the text and its guidance are short and public, and an hour with a UK lawyer before the 6th costs far less than the five years the law allows.