When the paid social network OnlyFans announced on Thursday it was banning “sexually explicit” material, it was the equivalent of Playboy in its pomp deciding to publish only the articles. It’s not that some of the articles weren’t quite good, but they were obviously never the point. In the same way, while you can find plenty of stuff on OnlyFans that isn’t porn – training tips from athletes and DJs supplying “inspirational content” – everyone knows that isn’t the reason most people go to the site.
All the same, OnlyFans prefers to draw a tactful veil over its adventures in the flesh trade. In the dust-dry words of its mission statement, it positions itself as a “social platform revolutionizing creator and fan connections”, which “allows [creators] to monetize their content while developing authentic relationships with their fanbase”. Or, in less corporate language, it lets your followers pay you for whatever you do. Users can set a monthly subscription, charge for individual posts or produce bespoke videos and pictures on request.
For some performers, this has been highly lucrative: the most successful accounts can boast of revenue in the tens of thousands per month. And the majority of those successful accounts are trading in porn, which drove the site’s phenomenal pandemic growth: OnlyFans took £1.7bn in sales in the year to November 2020. Bluntly, the site connected men whose lockdowns left them with time to burn with women whose lockdowns left them needing money.
Socially distancing escorts, porn performers with no sets to go to and women with no background in the sex industry who just wondered if they could get a piece of the action all found a home on OnlyFans. For the site’s elite, it’s a happy partnership. They get to control their schedule and image; OnlyFans takes a cut for providing the platform.
For others, though, it’s a grimmer business. Topless shots lose their novelty surprisingly quickly. You have to offer variety to keep the punters coming back, which means the pressure to break your own boundaries is constant, especially if you really need the money. And then there’s the really bleak stuff. Underage girls. Trafficked women. Sex for sale (despite this being formally banned). OnlyFans moderators told a BBC investigation that they had seen bestiality, spycam footage and one case of apparent incest.
Despite the widespread perception that OnlyFans is an ethical way of acquiring “fap” material, whistleblowing moderators paint a picture of a company with little commitment to corporate responsibility. The site reportedly discouraged vigorous enforcement of its own rules and the more followers an account had, the more leniently it would be dealt with, it was alleged. This is particularly disturbing in light of the kinds of material claimed to be involved, but it’s also wholly consistent with OnlyFans as a money-making enterprise.
Moderation, especially pre-moderating all content, which is the only way to ensure nothing criminal slips through, is expensive. (It’s also traumatic for the moderators, who have to see all the terrible things that the rest of the world needs protecting from.) Using moderation to clamp down on users who make money would eat into profits even further. Platforms that host user-generated content of any kind are inevitably caught between the demands of decency and profit. When the content involved is porn, however, the push to extremity and the proximity to illegal activity make the tensions especially keen.
OnlyFans’s decision will seem perverse to many onlookers (and not the kind of perversity you’d pay a subscription for). They’ve seen other sites try to make the transition to mainstream content before and they’ve seen how many have stumbled into irrelevance as a result, notably Tumblr, which in 2018 swept out all the porn and went from being the next big thing in social networks to a gif-riddled ghost town.
Others see it as a betrayal; for them, OnlyFans is turning its back on the very people who made it a success. But it’s not a sudden rush of puritanism that has made OnlyFans pull out of the sex business: it’s simply a question of hard cash. In a statement, OnlyFans explained the decision was a result of pressure from payment processors, who refuse to be exposed to the risk of handling proceeds from illegal material.
In November last year, Visa and Mastercard banned payments to the porn giant MindGeek after a New York Times investigation found the company’s sites were hosting “revenge porn” and only resumed dealings when several thousand videos had been deleted. For OnlyFans, which is rumoured to be looking at going public, this is an intolerable prospect. Admittedly, there’s something strange about banks becoming de facto arbiters of acceptable smut. Then again, the sex industry is an industry above all else. From bedroom to boardroom, money makes the choices.
Every perky-boobed success story in online sex work is shadowed by the grimy side of the business. A laissez-faire approach to content will make you wealthy, but it’s also incompatible with being a legitimate enterprise, as the smaller rivals lining up to take OnlyFans’s place will discover if they succeed. How many underage nudes, how many creepshots, are a reasonable price to pay so others can profit?
Ethical porn might be theoretically possible, but it’s never going to be very plausible for a company that wants to make money. In the end, sticking to the articles might be the safer bet after all.
• Sarah Ditum is a writer on politics, culture and lifestyle
