On Aug. 19, sex workers woke to the news that starting Oct. 1, adult content would be banned from OnlyFans. The social media platform’s popularity exploded during the pandemic as unprecedented unemployment rates brought new users to the site.
Attracting more than 130 million users and generating more than $2 billion in sales last year — of which 20% of that figure is kept by OnlyFans. The site’s growth and popularity even earned a name-drop from Beyoncé on Megan Thee Stallion’s 2020 hit “Savage” remix.
While OnlyFans has been praised in some circles for giving sex workers a safe place to do their jobs, sex work is still stigmatized in most parts of the world, including in the United States. In a statement posted to their Twitter account in August, OnlyFans provided context to their proposed ban on adult content saying that the changes were meant to ensure the longevity of the company and that ultimately, “These changes are to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers.”
Following immense online pressure, OnlyFans made a quick U-turn on their decision stating on Aug. 25 that, “We have secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community and have suspended the planned October 1 policy change.” Creators are still worried, however, highlighting the vagueness of the statement, leading some to believe that the policy may be reintroduced if those assurances fall through.
“I had a career for 13 years and this July I quit and started doing OnlyFans full-time,” shares Kaden Hylls. The Orlando-based creator started his OnlyFans with his husband Tyler following a suggestion from friends in May 2019 with the simple goal of covering his husband’s health insurance. After collaborating with other creators, just over a year later, their channel has grown and they are now in the top .13% of all earners on OnlyFans. Hylls called the move to fulltime sex work a gamble and was disappointed in OnlyFans initial decision to ban adult content on the platform.
“I’ve created a business off of this platform, and I quit my job, and I purchased my first car, and I have a mortgage and everything’s relying on [OnlyFans] and for them to just in one quick swoop take that away without even giving any consideration to everybody was the biggest slap in the face, because we’re the ones that helped build that platform,” he says.
Dan Edwards is a college student who has found financial freedom through OnlyFans. A former part time construction worker, Edwards isn’t worried about OnlyFans because he has been cross-promoting his content on other sites like JustForFans. The one thing he pointed out is that while he is a student, creating adult content is a full-time job.
“A lot of people always say that it’s not a real job. It’s a full-time job because you’re always on social media, always trying to push your content and your product. You’re always trying to gain views and so it’s something you’ve got to be on 24/7. It’s not like a 9-5 job where you can clock out, you always have to be ready,” Edwards says.
Sex workers have had to evolve and migrate from one platform to another since well before the age of the internet, as censorship surrounding sexual speech has continually increased.
Morgan Le Shade, owner of Tampa-based Black Rose Photography, has dealt with OnlyFans before.
“I’m mainly known for my male erotic photography as well as my drag performer photography,” he shares. Le Shade started his OnlyFans account to increase his income, but to also have a place for his erotic art as most other platforms forbid his content. But he says his account was randomly shut down with nearly $600 still owed to him. When news of the ban reached Le Shade, he was ready to jump into action. “While I personally don’t rely on that platform for a large majority of my income many of my friends do, especially my friends who are sex workers. I was even ready to help some people I knew create content for free for a small period of time so they could have a way to launch things on new platforms and stay on their feet.”
As news that OnlyFans would be dropping sexually explicit content from its site, social media lit up with condemnation for the site from content creators and subscribers who accused OnlyFans of building its business on the backs of sex workers and then dropping them once they were a billion-dollar company. But according to a statement made by the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for the adult entertainment industry, OnlyFans isn’t to blame.
“While many will blame OnlyFans for sacrificing sex workers in pursuit of investment capital and mainstream recognition, we need to be frank about where the true fault lies: with the banks and credit card companies like Mastercard, who have refused to stand up to a misguided and ill-intentioned evangelical War on Porn,” they wrote.
The fight to take down online sexual content, and sex work in general, goes back before OnlyFans.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, formerly known as Morality in Media, started as a primarily Catholic nonprofit in 1962. The far-right, anti-porn organization have campaigned against sex shops, the decriminalization of sex work and advocated for abstinence-only sex education. In the 1990s, MIM boycotted Disney after the company began to provide spousal benefits to the partners of LGBTQ employees.
Rebranded to NCOSE in 2015, their mission shifted to “expose the links between all forms of sexual exploitation” while also maintaining their anti-LGBTQ ideals.
Patrick A. Trueman, NCOSE’s current president, has ties to the American Family Association and Family Research Council where he previously served as director of government affairs and senior legal counsel respectively. Both organizations are designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center for their anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
Exodus Cry, another group fighting against the pornography industry, was originally developed out of a weekly prayer group founded in 2007 by Benjamin Nolot and is a Christian nonprofit organization. According to its website, Exodus Cry uses funding to change laws that will “end the sex industry” and “works with governments and legislators … to implement legislation that creates criminal culpability for sex buyers, pimps, and traffickers, and brings freedom and support to victims.”
In Feb. 2020, Exodus Cry’s director of abolition, Laila Mickelwait, launched a campaign against Pornhub calling for the site to be shut down. Using the hashtag “#Traffickinghub” and co-sponsored by NCOSE, the campaign created a petition that was, according to their website, designed to hold Pornhub accountable for “enabling, distributing and profiting from real mass sexual crime.” By September, they had over 2 million signatures.
In early December, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published an op-ed that alleged Pornhub was being used to share Child Sex Abuse Material and sex abuse videos. Pornhub denied these claims, saying in an email to Canadian Press in Dec. 2020, “Any assertion that we allow (that) is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue … We have zero tolerance for child sexual abuse materials (CSAM). Pornhub is unequivocally committed to combating CSAM, and has instituted an industry-leading trust and safety policy to identify and eradicate illegal material from our community.”
However, under mounting pressure, Pornhub changed their policies to only allow verified users to upload and download content from the site and expanded its moderation protocols. This change meant that every piece of content found on Pornhub would now exclusively come from verified uploaders, a requirement that other online platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have yet to institute.
The change wasn’t enough. According to a story from the Institutional Investor, Kristof’s NYT column caught the attention of Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management. Ackman, a father of four daughters, read the column and noticed that Mastercard and Visa were payment processors for Pornhub. Ackman, who was friends with Mastercard’s then-CEO Ajay Banga, text Banga the article saying that Mastercard should do something about this.
Banga responded, “We’re on it.”
Two days following the removal of 10 million videos — 75% of Pornhub’s content — Mastercard and Visa announced, within an hour of each other, that following their own investigations into unlawful content on the site, they were cutting ties with Pornhub. Sex workers making a legal income as verified users, who were now the only ones able to upload or download content to Pornhub, were suddenly unable to receive payouts through the nation’s two largest credit card companies. The effects of this, sex workers argued, would put more people at risk of exploitation, something the conservative groups claimed they wanted to prevent.
“It is clear that Pornhub is being targeted not because of our policies and how we compare to our peers, but because we are an adult content platform,” Pornhub announced in a statement responding to Mastercard and Visa’s decision. “[NCOSE and Exodus Cry] are organizations dedicated to abolishing pornography, banning material they claim is obscene, and shutting down commercial sex work. These are the same forces that have spent 50 years demonizing Playboy, the National Endowment for the Arts, sex education, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and even the American Library Association. Today, it happens to be Pornhub.”
Pornhub’s statement also referenced a report by third-party Internet Watch Foundation, which found 118 instances of CSAM on Pornhub in the last three years, and points out that in the same timeframe, Facebook’s own self-reported transparency data found 84 million instances of CSAM on the social media platform.
The removal of the majority of Pornhub’s content was a massive victory for NCOSE and Exodus Cry, the latter calling it “one of the most significant actions ever taken against criminal porn” and “a huge WIN for the united #Traffickinghub movement.” Emboldened by their victory, the organizations turned toward NCOSE’s “Dirty Dozen List.” The list, which features companies like Amazon, Twitter and Netflix, is produced annually and is meant to call out twelve mainstream companies who are “profiting from sexual abuse and exploitation.”
By the end of Dec. 2020, OnlyFans had reached a level of mainstream visibility that was comparable to pre-purge Pornhub, causing it to be added to the 2021 Dirty Dozen List.
When the news of OnlyFans’ ban broke, NCOSE quickly and happily accepted the credit, stating on their website that the decision made by OnlyFans, “comes after much advocacy.” The conservative groups had once again lobbied Mastercard, asking them to create more restrictive policies surrounding adult content under the guise of abolishing sex trafficking and exploitation.
This led to Mastercard writing a new policy for adult content sites it works with and released the proposed changes this past April.
The new policy requires, “the banks that connect merchants to our network … to certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content.” These changes also include age and identity verification for content creators, a content review process before publication, complaint review processes within seven days and a stringent appeals process for content to be removed, all in what appears to be an effort to over complicate and deter sex workers from creating and uploading content.
Mastercard’s new policies went into effect on Oct. 15 and the full extent and impact of these changes have yet to be seen. According to Le Shade, something has to change.
“Stop with all the archaic slut shaming ways and leave sex workers alone,” he says. “They aren’t bothering anyone and I’m willing to bet a lot of those making decisions are secretly subscribers and consumers of much of the content they are actively harming.”
Kaden and Tyler Hylls can be found at LetsEatCakeXx.com and on OnlyFans under @LetsEatCakeXx.
Dan Edwards can be found on several social media platforms, including OnlyFans and JustFor.Fans, under @danedwards3x.
Morgan Le Shade is a Tampa Bay-area photographer. You can learn more about him and his photography at BlackRosePhotog.com.
