So, google is a wonderful thing, and I can actually take a look at what got pulled. I'm not a member of the moderation community but what I'll say is that you might want to take it up with them instead of hit up the forums. This is basically all opinion on my end and might be wrong:
The irl stuff exists in a gray area for the hub. The porn images aren't manipulations. They aren't someone's real face, who could potentially be pissed off that their face is used in an odd way, and call their bosses at a photo studio to move a kitchen sink of trouble towards the website. They are a group that
specifically creates that content trying to advertise.
That gif shows a VR headset. If that's remixed promotional material, someone can send a legal notice threatening the website. And figuring out if they are even sane is going to be a protracted and emotional process. Figuring that they are in fact sane, they have the law on their side, and the resources to litigate what was what ended hypnochan, over audio files.
Is it risk adverse behavior that defies logic? Yeah.
If it isn't followed can it take down the entire site, over not following up on some emails? Also, yeah.
You did nothing wrong. The image was pretty damn good. Seems like risk mitigation because when you are serving upwards of thousands of viewers a .1% chance of failure is frighteningly significant. And <<
techcrunch.com/2008/09/03...-separation-is-now-three/ | since there's what, six degrees of separation between folks in a social network or less>>? This isn't super unreasonable risk mitigation. There's parts where yeah, the logic gets iffy because Disney exists and is litigation happy over any and all of their ip - but the exception proves the rule because they'd probably advertise the creepy relationship their snake has with a young boy if they sued over that IP. Might think about posting it on Hypnopics-collective where the risk mitigation is that "The only people seeing images are one who have an account on the website."