The OnlyFans Situation Summarized
From Existing Sources
Much of the discourse surrounding sex work on social media, specifically Twitter, can be downright wrong, rude, or completely missing the point. More often than not, it’s a trap that feeds off of hate clicks, anger and mistruths, while those with real power are changing the rules to benefit their imagination of what society should be.
There are, however, great journalists like Gustavo Turner and performers like Siri Dahl who provide real answers, from the frontlines of the adult industry. I wanted to summarize some of the stuff that has been reported by them, so if anyone asks what the OnlyFans situation is about, you can just read this and follow the links.
The actual story, as both Gustavo and Siri have described, is about credit card companies, moralizing hedge fund managers, and naïve journalists.
A right-wing group called Exodus Cry, whose tagline is: Every Person Should Be Free - has convinced certain very people with power that sex work, online, should be illegal. Wikipedia, describes Exodus Cry as:
a non-profit advocacy organization seeking the abolition of the legal commercial sex industry, including pornography, strip clubs and sex work, as well as illegal sex trafficking.
Exodus Cry is supported in Congress by moral crusader and original drafter of SESTA-FOSTA (The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)) Act, Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO).
In December 2020, Nicholas Kristof wrote "The Children of Pornhub". This dominoed into PornHub deleting 80% of its user created content.
Bill Ackman, the Epstein adjacent hedge fund guy, read the Kristoff piece and texted the Mastercard CEO about the story - then tweeted:
OnlyFans, a total beast of the 1099 creator economy, has paid out billions of dollars in its short life as a website, to creators, aka sex workers.
Axios has the numbers:
Total amount paid to creators since inception: $3.2 billion
More than 300 creators earn at least $1 million annually.
Around 16,000 creators earn at least $50,000 annually.
More than seven million "fans" spend on OnlyFans each month. It has even more users who only consume free content.
In May BBC dropped a report that revealed that underage users in the UK were selling images and videos on OnlyFans. Following up on their initial reporting, BBC announced: "OnlyFans allows moderators to give multiple warnings to accounts which post illegal content, BBC News has learned."
The reporter then tweeted on August 20th, 2021:
Following this report, OnlyFans then announced there will be new Terms of Service, which will block explicit content for what creators can post / make money off of starting on October 1st.
Creators like Siri Dahl, who make a living from OnlyFans, spoke to Kristof for his piece, are now facing digital job loss in the year of our lord, 2021.
Between Exodus Cry's save the children campaign, Rep. Wagner and Kristoff's obsession with online porn, and Bill Ackman's white knight tweet about credit card processing, there's a whole creator economy now losing their digital livelihoods in the face of global austerity.
Once again, I urge you to follow Gustavo Turner’s reporting for more information as it happens. This is just a summary of the work he has already done over many months of reporting.
If you have any questions, please let me know.
I feel like the question no one is asking is: can CC companies be prosecuted/sued for processing payment for illegal material under FOSTA-SESTA. If the answer is yes, then it renders the whole "nefarious actors" argument moot. Of course there's been a long-standing campaign to erase porn and sex work, but in this case it's entirely possible that CC companies are just protecting themselves legally by refusing service to a platform that had been proven unable to properly moderate all its user-generated content. The fault, then, would be with the platform.