Sex Workers Dealt Another Blow As OnlyFans Moves To Ban Explicit Content

The livelihoods of some sex workers and adult performers are under threat again, as OnlyFans moves to introduce new guidelines that will “prohibit the posting of any content containing sexually explicit conduct,” from the beginning of October.

The change is an attempt to sanitise the platform and ensure the “long-term sustainability of the platform”. A statement from OnlyFans states frankly that the changes are to cater to the requests of “banking partners and payout providers.” Bloomberg reported in July that the organisation was seeking funding and backers to help it become a “more mainstream media platform and lessen its reputation for porn.”

Convoluted History

OnlyFans was launched in 2016 and grew into a platform used by sex workers and adult entertainers to make a direct stream of income via subscriber-based content. OnlyFans takes a 20 percent fee.

The platform also grew over the world’s successive COVID-19 lockdowns, and sex workers used it to substitute income they’d lost from the ability to operate face-to-face. But health influencers and other content creators jumped on board too, including former Disney star Bella Thorne who bragged of making one million dollars in a day — a scandal that some sex workers said detracted from their opportunity. Soon after, OnlyFans introduced price caps, though the platform says the changes were “not based on any one user.”

“OnlyFans doesn’t like in-person sex workers,” Tilly Lawless said in The Guardian earlier this month. “It doesn’t want to be held responsible for people soliciting prostitution — so if you do full-service sex work outside of OnlyFans, regardless of the legality, your account can be shut down and your earnings seized.”

Jenna Love told Junkee that OnlyFans has never supported sex workers, “despite the platform gaining the popularity and name it has because of sex workers.”

“If you ask them if they are a porn site they have always said no, even though the public perception is that it is absolutely a porn site, and they have always seemed quite happy to take the revenue that comes with that perception,” says Love.

The BBC today reported that leaked internal documents from OnlyFans detailed that moderators give multiple warnings to accounts that post illegal content, with lenience towards successful accounts, though the platform responded that it does “not tolerate violation of our terms of service.” An anonymous source told the BBC that he “found illegal and extreme content in videos — including bestiality involving dogs and the use of spy cams, guns, knives and drugs…OnlyFans told him he over-moderated.”

OnlyFans’ new direction is reminiscent of Tumblr’s ban of pornography in late 2018 — which caused its global traffic to drop dramatically from 521 million to 370 million in a matter of months.

And this is another story in social media platforms attempting to distance themselves from pornography. Love says that despite her sex work being legal, “even the most sex-positive areas of the internet can have me banned for it…most payment processors discriminate against in-person sex work, and we’re all at the mercy of the banks.”

“And I think this will be a devastating blow to many who have used it as a lifeline, particularly in the pandemic.”

While the platform will still allow nudity, it will ban sexual content. Tilly Lawless shared on her Instagram that she believed the move would “mean celebs/influencers who use it for vanilla content will be fine, it’s the [sexworkers] who use it for pornographic content that won’t…Gentrification of an online space in real-time!”