OnlyFans Drops Planned Porn Ban, Will Continue to Allow Sexually Explicit Content https://t.co/cdTrrm1sh3
— Variety (@Variety) August 25, 2021
As far as I can tell, OnlyFans ran a classic HBS marketing capsule: They told their bankers that their customers would *strongly* protest attempts to ban ‘explicit content’; they announced an upcoming ban on such content; customers lost their — tempers — all over the media.
Because the bankers are very much in favor of getting more money from customers, an accommodation was reached, and OnlyFans will continue to permit ‘explicit content’…
… OnlyFans may have been able to resolve its conflict with banks, some of which had refused to do business with the site, by going public with the issue — and publicizing the large amount of money that flows through the site, on the order of $300 million in payouts per month.
OnlyFans founder and CEO Tim Stokely put the blame for the porn ban on banks in an interview with the Financial Times published Aug. 24, saying that banks including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of New York Mellon and the U.K.’s Metro Bank had cut off OnlyFans’ ability to pay creators.
The furious backlash among OnlyFans creators also certainly pushed the company to quickly resolve the problem. OnlyFans’ decision to ban porn had infuriated sex workers who have relied on the site to support themselves. In frustration, some adult creators had already nixed their OnlyFans pages and moved to alternate platforms.
Founded in 2016, the site claims to have more than 130 million registered users and over 2 million creators…
I hadn’t realized that OnlyFans was incorporated in the United Kingdom. That explains how it got off the ground in the first place (American law being so ‘anti-smut’), and also why this time it was the BBC that was so worried about ‘the children!!!’:
Internal documents, leaked to BBC News, reveal that OnlyFans allows moderators to give multiple warnings to accounts that post illegal content on its online platform before deciding to close them.
Described as a “compliance manual”, the documents also show that staff are asked to be more lenient towards successful accounts on the British content-sharing service.
Moderation specialists and child protection experts say this shows OnlyFans – which is best known for hosting pornography – has some “tolerance” for accounts posting illegal content.
OnlyFans says it goes far beyond “all relevant global safety standards and regulations” and does not tolerate breaches of its terms of service…
In May, BBC News revealed the site was failing to prevent under-18s from selling and appearing in explicit videos, despite it being illegal for children to do so. At the time, OnlyFans said attempts to use the site fraudulently were “rare”…
The earlier ‘crimebuster’:
… As part of our investigation, we found that one 17-year-old from a suburb in the south-east of England had sold videos of herself masturbating and playing with sex toys, while an under-18 participated in graphic videos hosted on an adult account in Nevada, US, in breach of the company’s terms and conditions.
We were also able to set up an account for an underage creator, by using a 26-year-old’s identification, showing how the site’s age-verification process could be cheated.
OnlyFans says it has now shut down the accounts. But BBC News has also heard from child protection experts across the UK and US, spoken to dozens of police forces and schools, and obtained anonymised extracts from Childline counsellor notes, about underage experiences on OnlyFans. The notes included one girl who told counsellors she had accessed the site when she was just 13…
Also, ‘anonymous reports of pupils using the site’ from schools, counsellors warning of creators who were ‘victims of prior sexual abuse and those with mental health issues and suicidal thoughts’, third-party complaints of unauthorized image use, and a ‘US watchdog’ insisting ‘missing children’ are appearing in OnlyFan videos. Any or all of which *might* even be true! Or then again: School kids lie to administrators about their criminal sophistication; people with unhappy pasts and/or mental health issues can still freely choose to create adult content; image pirates are lawbreakers everywhere; and waaaay too many ‘US watchdogs’ are QAnon sites.
Nobody (sane) is arguing in favor of exploitation, especially of children. The question is whether driving all erotic content ‘underground’ actually protects children / sex workers… or just enables the abuse of people with no other options.
Erotic videos are at least a tangible good and/or service. https://t.co/cpUiFq9FjW
— Jeff Fecke (@jkfecke) August 21, 2021
Sidebar: The New Yorker is earnestly perturbed that “The Queer Past Gets Deleted on eBay” — again, because bankers are easy targets for anti-sex krewsaders:
… Recently, eBay has shifted company policy in ways that will make further acquisitions of erotica difficult. In May, the platform banned the sale of “sexually oriented materials”—including magazines, movies, and video games—and closed its “Adults Only” category to new listings in the United States. There are a few explicit exemptions, including Playboy; Penthouse; the gay art zine Butt; the satirical, women-run erotica magazine On Our Backs; and something called Fantastic Men, which appears to be a misspelling of the PG-rated men’s style magazine Fantastic Man. “Nude art listings that do not contain sexually suggestive poses or sexual acts are allowed,” the policy states. Materials falling afoul of such distinctions—which could presumably include anything from reproductions of Michelangelo’s horned-up “The Expulsion from Paradise” to back copies of Black Inches—are, apparently, now beyond the pale.
The ban appears to be related to the House’s Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Senate’s Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act, known together as FOSTA-SESTA, an effort by victim’s-rights advocates and right-wing activists to crack down on sex work. One feature of the legislative package was to make Web sites liable for hosted content that might “promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person.” After Donald Trump signed FOSTA-SESTA into law, in 2018, Craigslist shut down its personals listings, Tumblr banned sexual content, Facebook prohibited the formation of groups organized around sexual encounters, and Instagram ramped up its policing of user content, especially that which includes any hint of human nudity. Also of possible relevance: eBay recently began using the Dutch fintech company Adyen for electronic payment services. Like many payment-processing companies, Adyen refuses to participate in the sale of adult materials. Similar concerns by payout providers were reportedly at the center of the recent decision by OnlyFans, the content subscription platform, to ban sexual content—a move they reversed after considerable outcry led by the sex workers who, in large part, helped the company build a valuation of some one billion dollars. In a written statement to me about the change in policy at eBay, a spokesperson said, “eBay is committed to maintaining a safe, trusted and inclusive marketplace for our community of buyers and sellers and we are continually reevaluating product categories allowed on the platform.”…
not to do serious deals-based tweets but the onlyfans thing is instructive in that no one goes into any business enterprise anymore to “fill a need” or even “make money” everyone is just secretly dreaming of their big SPAC/IPO/merger payday
— Richie Deals, the Cybersecurity King (@allahliker) August 19, 2021
A successful rebellion by an ad hoc sex worker guild against a tech conglomerate IS the cyberpunk future we were promised. https://t.co/2iFMhomVn8
— zeddy (@Zeddary) August 25, 2021
jonas
Maybe Qanon folks should be more concerned about whether their batshit insane conspiracies are pushing followers to take their kids to Mexico and then murder them. Just a thought.
Jerzy Russian
For a minute I was afraid I would have to subscribe to this site in order to read the late-night posts.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Looks like I picked the wrong week to exit porn addiction rehab.
Sister Golden Bear
To answer your question, as some who knows people who do/have done, sex work, pushing it underground has definitely made it unsafer.
One reason sex workers flocked to OnlyFans is that it put them in control vs. traditional shady (and men-dominated porn industry.
SESTRA/FOSTRA have also greatly hurt sex workers. For example, yes Back Page enabled prostitution — but it also provided sex workers with ways to screen potential clients, as well as ways to compare notes on clients and alert each other to dangerous clients.
These also disproportionately hit people who are already marginalized by society, LGBTQ folks, especially POC ones. The majority of trans women killed each year were street sex workers because that was the only work they could get, and safer ways of doing prostitution weren’t’ available.
Poe Larity
So is John’s mopping channel explicit content or pr0n/smut?
The Dangerman
Rule 34 lives on.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
What I don’t get is why was Chase upset about taking money from porn?
After all, they infamously did business with Hitler until FDR outlawed it in June 1941. Even today they still do business with murderers and traffickers around the world
Old Dan and Little Ann
I heard about only fans for the 1st time back in the spring. I was kinda shocked and I’m only 46. I thought I was tuned in. Not so much.
mrmoshpotato
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
Because they’re prudes?
mrmoshpotato
Any Dump-humping, dumbass horses out there? (We know there are plenty of humans.)
Benw
OMG you guys if you ever get a chance to see RANCID in concert DO IT. Saw them tonight and they fucking killed.
Omnes Omnibus
@Benw: I walked out in the middle of a evening Corporate Finance class in law school to go to one of their shows. Another friend and I simply told the professor at the break that were wouldn’t be back after it because we had Rancid tickets. Great show. They opened with Maxwell Murder.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Benw: Hmmm, they don’t sound fresh.
Omnes Omnibus
@?BillinGlendaleCA: They have been around for a while.
Benw
@Omnes Omnibus: nice! I think Maxwell Murder really addresses several topics that might interest corporate finance. You all could’ve taken a field trip.
Their encore tonight was Radio, Time Bomb, and Ruby Soho and I completely lost my shit the whole way through.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: Ah, that would explain it!
James E Powell
@Old Dan and Little Ann:
When I first heard “only fans” I assumed it was a sports thing.
Benw
@Omnes Omnibus: ha!
@?BillinGlendaleCA: we forgot to refrigerate after opening.
prostratedragon
@mrmoshpotato: Aside from that, which is likely to be true, there’s also the control issue Sister GB implies above. Denial of recourse to the workers, against whom there is an uncredibility bias, can be used as built in blackmail. The recent history of the United States has strengthened my conviction that there are those who think that way.
NotMax
@James E Powell
First heard of it here when the initial hoo-ha took place, and still can’t shake thinking of it as sport related.
Now, if it was called BonelyFans there would be much less confusion.
JCJ
@Benw: I saw them at Summerfest in Milwaukee a few years ago. They were co-headliners with Rise Against. A very fine evening.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax:
Well done!
Benw
@JCJ: sounds awesome
Martin
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: It’s not quite about porn. A lot of credit for this is being given to Brunis piece at NYT about nonconsensual videos at pornhub, which was a fair criticism. From there the credit processors decided that they could clamp down on exploitation and trafficking by denying those sites access to payment systems, which to be fair is a good solution. Pornhub started to fix their own problems as a result of this but the payment systems didn’t really differentiate between consensual porn and trafficking, revenge porn, etc. and so it started catching a variety of other sites/content.
I don’t know if the payment processors have realized they’ve gone too far, or what’s changing. I mean, I don’t think Bruni intended to attack sex work, but at the same time he’s not exactly a defender of it either.
The payment processing side of the business is a lot easier to do this stuff with than policing criminal networks, as it happens.
Martin
Ida hit cat 4 in an awful hurry.
KrackenJack
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: A cynical person might suggest that cracking down on smut sites provides moral cover for their other, much more lucrative lines of business.
Winston
Why would I want to search out only fans? There are so many porn sites on the internet (free) that it would seem redundant and unsatisfying to pay.
Winston
@Martin: I’m just glad it didn’t take an Irma course. Sucks to live in Louisiana for the last couple years. (knock on wood).l
oatler
@NotMax: The fact that you call it hoo ha tells me you’re not old enough for it.
Ascap_scab
Whether this (the bank story) was real or a marketing ploy, it shows OnlyFans to be yet another unstable platform for sex/porn.
Twitter lost most of it’s perceived value in ham-handed ownership changes where porn was/was not/was kinda allowed.
Sooner or later, there will be an entity (I’m looking at you Bank of North Dakota) that will allow less-than-legal transactions like medical marijuana and OnlyFans to process payments (and make a killing).
Otherwise, the entire process will be driven underground to 4Chan / Bitcoin and the banking process will lose total control over smut. Once THAT happens, once enough people bypass the “normal” channels of business over sex and drugs, the JP Morgans will lose control over car loans (Tesla), home improvement (Home Depot), etc.
Once Tesla proves bypassing banks to be stable enough, then things move to the corporate world. What corporation wouldn’t want to stiff their current bankers with a completely off-the-books payment system?
Anotherlurker
I believe that if sex work was rid of its stigma and people really started to call out religion for the hypocritical, aggressive bullshit that it spews, the world would be a much better place.
After trying so hard my entire adult life to give religion the respect it deserves, I have come to the conclusion that religion deserves no respect at all.
I have just finished “The Mormons” by David Fitzgerald and it was my last straw regarding religion. I was shocked that anyone could buy the absolute bullshit vomited out by the Mormons. The chapter on Colorado City, AZ was particularly disgusting. The FLDS are truly a degenerate group of absolute scum and the elders of the main LDS only thinly condemn them.
The LDS and every fucking religion are cozy incubators for grifters, sadists, fascists, missogynists, xenophobes and every other type of lowlife which preys on the gullible, the lonely, the angry and the frightened.
I’m an Atheist and these assholes have some pair of balls to tell me that I’m immoral because I don’t buy one word of their preaching about their phony, sadistic, amoral Sky Daddy.
Fuck them.
Anne Laurie
I understand your anger, but, seriously: Some significant portion of the human population is hardwired to BELIEVE. They will find an organizing system for their life, whether benign (God / the gods want us to help each other & be kind to animals) or malignant (God wants us to murder all the unbelievers, plus everyone who doesn’t agree with murder) or just inexplicable (A rich guy on the internet told me to sell all my wordly goods and buy cryptocurrency, so that I may be known as one of the Chosen). I’m one of them — hopefully among the less obnoxious!
The Spousal Unit, however, is very much the opposite. I’m pretty sure there have always been Unbelievers, but religion — however locally defined — is such a valuable method of social organization, we don’t have a good grasp on their numbers. It’s like being left-handed: Now that the stigma is (mostly) gone, the global percentage of left-handers has gone from an estimated 2% to 10%… at least.
It’s a very good thing that left-handers, and atheists, are no longer punished for being themselves. But ‘forbidding’ all religious belief, IMO, would be like forbidding right-handedness — even if it could be attempted, it probably wouldn’t work. And whatever work-arounds leaked out around the edges would probably be worse, because people under threat don’t respond with charity and kindness.
Coloradoguy
And banning religion has been tried … during the French Revolution, the Stalin era, the Cultural Revolution in China, etc. etc. Results have been (very) bad every time. We just have to co-exist with it.
Anotherlurker
@Anne Laurie: Let me say that you are a rockstar, in my humble opinion. I am in awe of the wonderfully insiteful, brilliantly written material that you are constantly supplying , here on Baloonjuice.
How do you you do it? You must be exhausted or truly inspired.
I must give you a little bit of context to my rants. I was passively/agressively abused by a catholic priest, when I was in the 8th grade.
After gym class, when the locker room was empty and the self conscious and shy were finishing their showers, Father Alfred Soave cornered naked, self conscious me and started to fondle me. He said that I needed to come to the rectory after school to be fitted for an athletic supporter.
When I didn’t show up, he started with the passive/agressive manipulation. He told me that he was worried about my immortal soul and that I would remain a loser who didn’t respect the earthly representative of the sky daddy. He said he feared that I was going to Hell. He strongly suggested that I needed to talk to him. He basically said that I was a loser that god would send straight to Hell.
He did this for 5 years and by the time I left the shithole catholic high school I was convinced that I was worthless and that I was going to Hell. I Tried to convince myself that I was a good moral person but there was always this doubt in my mind that I was moral scum.
This horrible person truly damaged me for life and when I think of religion, he is the picture that flashes in my mind.
Look up “Father Alfred Soave. Diocese of Rockville Center” You will find a rundown of the crimes this bastard and his protectors and enablers committed.
BTW, what timezone are you in?
Anne Laurie
@Anotherlurker: I don’t blame you for hating ‘religion’. And I’m truly sorry (as someone who grew up technically part of a Catholic community myself) that ‘The Church’ permitted — even encouraged — so many monsters to destroy so many childrens’ lives.
(I live in the Eastern time zone, but as a virtual vampire, mostly sleeping during ‘prime time’ and working the late-night, early-morning shifts. Which I can do because I’m a genetic night owl, and retired from paid employment.)
Ken
I suppose at some point there must have been simultaneous cases where the feds are prosecuting person A for producing porn videos, and person B for violating the DCMA by copying A’s porn videos.
bjacques
@Anotherlurker: I’m an atheist, but I wonder sometimes at fellow atheists without histories like yours (as far as I know) who pick fights with religion in general, mostly on social media. The Enlightenment and its inheritors left plenty of space for slavery and exploitation, and the 20th century racked up an impressive body count without the benefit of religion. It seems many who really did have the luxury of leaving behind whatever religion they were born into failed to entirely do so. One guy almost ran some Christians out of a Democratic FB group by posting some anti-religious meme for no obvious reason.
Back on topic somewhat, Communist and fascist government also tried to stamp out prostitution, as “social parasitism”. Some people are just bastards under any banner.
Geminid
Some people express a lot of bigotry and intolerance towards religious people. On account of intolerance and bigotry among religious people.
Uncle Cosmo
@Martin: Surface water temps of 90 F to a depth of ~100′ will do that. Energy of evaporation followed by energy release of condensation at height is the dynamo that powers all tropical cyclones – which is why they all lose force and disperse once over land. But most here know that; just restating it for them as don’t..
Geminid
@bjacques: I was listening to a conservative talk show one night. It was a week before Christmas, and the host was whipping up resentment towards atheists who were suing local governments putting up small manger scenes in public parks. The host asked for atheists to call, and one did. Many atheists like him, he explained, have no problem with public expressions of religion like putting up Christmas creches, and did not care for efforts to suppress them. The host cut him off, thanked him, and moved on to the next atheist on the line. This one shared the views of the first atheist. So the host cut him off and thanked him. These were the wrong kind of atheists for his purpose.
gene108
People posting revenge porn, sexual assaults, and other unauthorized content finally got PornHub into trouble.
I’ve never visited OnlyFans, but I figured content creators had to put a bit more effort than just uploading revenge porn. Somehow pictured like Patreon, where users pay specific people to support their content.
Uncle Cosmo
@Anotherlurker: It is my contention that if some intrepid time traveler had switched L. Ron Hubbard and Joseph Smith at birth, the former would have invented something very much like Mormonism, and the latter something rather close to Scientology.
That said, the handful of Mormons I’ve met were to all appearances decent, bright, personable and a lot more conventional-USAn than I expected. (Can’t say the same about Scientology because to the best of my knowledge I never met any, at least none who “outed” themselves to me.)
Starfish
If children are accessing OnlyFans at school, it is school IT’s fault for not setting up their blacklist properly. Schools with internet access have to filter out things like Netflix because kids will slow down the schools entire internet by watching movies at lunch.
Ebay has been banning sexual content for a long time. I wonder how all the rules have changed over the years.
NotMax
Thread dead but almost can’t believe no one went for calling it the second coming of OnlyFans.
Another Scott
@Ascap_scab: I think you mean Tumblr, not Twitter, above.
The problem with a bank in West Overshoe, NE decoding to be the Amazon of porn banking is that banking (and wire transfers) are federally regulated. As long as some RWNJ congressman can stampede his colleagues into doing what they want to keep the porn economy underground (to ‘protect the children!!11’), then it’s extremely risky and probably can’t get financing to even get started.
We should be beyond recycling Ed Meese every couple of decades… ☹️
Cheers,
Scott.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: chase what matters.*
*authoritarianism
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@mrmoshpotato: fusachi pegasus heard that it would give him wings
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Benw: on the one hand, chuck eddy thinks rancid is the 1990s update of kix — good
on the other hand, tim armstrong is a pervert — bad
dr. bloor
Ah, the old “idiots don’t create cases, testing creates cases” defense.
No One You Know
@Anne Laurie: I appreciated this very much, and I think this is very helpful. When I left my church, I did not leave my faith. Just the average, uninspired version made by men, which was reasonable and liked science, but still tried to tell me what I “must” do, and I don’t believe it. Or see others do it.
James McDonald’s book Bad Faith did the rest. The politics behind the emerging Christian church of the Roman period is well- researched. Like the Spanish Inquisition study by one B. Netahanyu, McDonald found a ruthless fight to determine how to erect a political force and maintain a privileged hierarchy among a population that had been, and continued to be, oppressed. Netahanyu found more economic and hegemonic drivers (steal non-Catholic, and especially Jewish, wealth). McDonald found relatively heavier political and social drivers rooted in misogyny and power lust by people who didn’t have it.