OnlyFans is Only PG-13

OnlyFans wants to be more like Patreon and less like Pornhub. Happy Tuesday! OnlyFans was [once heralded]( as “chang[ing] sex work forever.” Now OnlyFans is changing, too. The platform is about to ban most of the pornographic content that made it what it is today: a company [worth over $1 billion]( with an estimated [130 million registered users]( who pay for subscriptions and send tips to more than [2 million creators](. It does more than just host porn, but porn has become one of its key paid offerings. The company’s popularity soared during the pandemic, as some people turned to it for income after losing their jobs, and others turned to it for adult entertainment while stuck inside their homes. But OnlyFans is about to be the latest company to turn away sex workers, as part of a broader, seemingly Sisyphean, effort to crack down on users that evade its rules to sell sexual imagery online that sometimes features children, nonconsenting adults, and otherwise illegal sex acts. Last week, OnlyFans announced that it would [no longer allow]( sexually explicit content as of October 1. The company later blamed the move, which seemed to run completely counter to its business strategy, on [pressure from banks]( that were rejecting wire transfers from the company to creators and closing OnlyFans’ corporate accounts, apparently because they disapproved of the sex work (or OnlyFan’s reportedly lax moderation of it) that took place on the platform. One of those sex workers, who goes by Quinn Finite, told Recode she averages $30,000 a month from OnlyFans. She charges $12.99 for a monthly subscription, for which her fans get sexually explicit photos and videos. For an additional fee, subscribers can have her rate their genitals or get sex videos she makes with her boyfriend or other OnlyFans creators. Quinn Finite, who is 24 years old, says that income has been “life-changing”; previously, she was a student with part-time work as a babysitter and as a fetish model. Since opening her OnlyFans account in May 2020 (“I’ve always thought about being an online sex worker, and the pandemic gave me the perfect excuse to start,” she told Recode), she’s been able to move to a more comfortable apartment and save money. At the same time, she says the work can be anxiety-producing, because she never knows when it could suddenly be cut off or drastically reduced — as will likely happen to her OnlyFans account on October 1. “I'm very frustrated but not surprised by this change,” Quinn Finite told Recode. “Sex workers are often the first ones to be unfairly affected by internet censorship that inevitably goes on to affect everyone else too.” But Quinn Finite’s experience with OnlyFans isn’t common. OnlyFans’ top earners make millions, but relatively few of its creators get anything close to a full-time income, as a [New York Times article]( detailed. For them, the trade-off between putting sexually explicit content out there for anyone to see and the few dollars made off of it — not to mention the social or job consequences down the road — may not be worth it. And as OnlyFans’ popularity has increased, it’s been increasingly targeted by companies and advocates who think online sex work should be banned or better monitored, especially when a platform is contributing to the proliferation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online. A bipartisan group of more than 100 members of Congress recently [called on]( the Department of Justice to investigate OnlyFans for CSAM, and the platform was the recent subject of a [BBC investigation]( that said OnlyFans was discouraging its moderators from banning illegal content on the site (OnlyFans told the BBC that it complies with all laws and upholds its terms of service that forbid illegal content). This all comes after Mastercard, Visa, and Discover pulled their payment processing services from Pornhub, a YouTube for pornography that is one of the most popular sites on the internet, after a New York Times [investigation]( last December found that it was “infested” with videos of what appeared to be sexual assaults, including on children. Currently, people who want to subscribe to Pornhub’s Premium service have to pay by wiring money from their bank accounts or using cryptocurrency. Mastercard recently announced [a new policy](, set to take effect on October 15, that it would not provide services to adult content companies that didn’t have adequate age and consent verification measures in place. And while OnlyFans says Mastercard didn’t pressure it to remove sexually explicit content from the site, it’s hard not to believe that what happened to Pornhub didn’t influence its decision here. “It’s a huge impact, and Mastercard’s really leading the way,” Dani Pinter, senior legal counsel for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), told Recode. NCOSE is one of the groups that has been [pushing]( financial institutions to cut off sites that it believes don’t properly monitor for or effectively prevent sexual abuse and exploitation. Payment services are always going to be more risk-averse and less sex-positive than the sites themselves — and, as we’ve seen, they have a lot of control over them. Pinter said it’s “theoretically” possible for people to do “ethical, consensual pornography or sex work,” — robust age and consent verification for all participants would be a start — but she hasn’t seen any examples of that. She has, however, seen countless examples of content that she considers violent and exploitative. That’s what she says buyers will ultimately demand, and she believes some sex workers who don’t want to create this kind of content are pressured to provide it if they want to continue to earn a suitable income. “I think it would be hard to do what you wanted in that space and be successful with an audience, unfortunately,” Pinter said. Even Apple is trying to crack down on CSAM in the [face of criticism]( that it hasn’t done enough to monitor for such content and that its privacy-first encryption policies make it virtually impossible to do so. Its [controversial solution]( is to place software on users’ devices that will scan their iCloud photo libraries for CSAM. Where does this leave the adult sex workers? Quinn Finite is pretty sure she won’t be able to do the same business on the new OnlyFans that she did on the old one. She says she’s planning on cutting her subscription fees and posting only the kind of content that is approved (“Playboy-style nudes and my more casual topless dancing/chatting videos”), while migrating her more explicit content to a platform that accepts it: Fansly, a platform that’s very similar to OnlyFans (including its use of financial institutions to make and accept payments, which could make it just as vulnerable to being cut off as OnlyFans was), appears to be where many creators are heading. She expects to take an income hit in September as she makes the transition but hopes it’ll come back once she and the majority of creators settle on a new site to host their content and their fans follow. We’ll see which site becomes the new OnlyFans. 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