It’s starting to feel like the news media has smelled blood in the water. After adult industry titan Pornhub became a target for anti-porn activists and credit card companies alike, a feeding frenzy seems to be fast approaching. The atmosphere is ripe for more allegations leveled at more industry giants and now, predictably, the BBC has taken aim at OnlyFans.
In an exposé published on Wednesday, BBC reporters Noel Titheradge and Rianna Croxford alleged they had uncovered instances of underage models using OnlyFans to sell photos and videos for profit. The article (whose title, appropriately enough, mirrors the December New York Times column that launched anti-Pornhub sentiment into the mainstream consciousness) alleged, “British subscription site OnlyFans is failing to prevent underage users from selling and appearing in explicit videos.”
The article cited several specific examples of underage people who had knowingly fooled the platform’s age-verification systems in order to post content and make profits. OnlyFans was quoted from several statements issued about these cases—reporting that they’d shut down the offending accounts, refunded user subscription fees, and required that prospective models go through a complex series of checkpoints in order to prove their age, which is “always evolving” with new technology. According to the BBC, “It also said it manually reviews every application to stop under-age access, and has increased staffing numbers in compliance, in line with the growth of the site.”
Still, the article goes out of its way to cast doubt on the platform’s intentions. “The site’s age-verification process could be cheated,” they wrote after successfully setting up an account for a 16-year-old using her older sister’s passport—having already failed to gain access using a fake ID. The reporters raised an eyebrow at models on the site, calling them “creators,” using quotation marks to imply that people who make erotic content somehow don’t deserve the title. And they leaned heavily alleged cases of exploitation related to them by “police forces and schools,” with no specific details that OnlyFans could use to prove or disprove their credibility.
Chief Constable Simon Bailey, a UK child-protection officer, was quoted saying, “The company is not doing enough to put in place the safeguards that prevent children exploiting the opportunity to generate money, but also for children to be exploited.”
But OnlyFans told the BBC in a statement: “We use a combination of state-of-the-art technology together with human monitoring and review to prevent children under the age of 18 from sharing content on OnlyFans.…This is something that we take very seriously. We constantly review our systems to ensure they are as robust as possible.”
The family that founded and more or less runs OnlyFans, the Stokelys, were profiled earlier in the week by The Guardian, where the company revealed that they’d “added 69 million active customers,” raised profits “from £6m to £53m,” and “£20m in dividends to its backers” in 2020. But, according to The Guardian, “OnlyFans also acknowledged in its accounts that its business model could be threatened if illegal underage material…were found on its site. The company’s directors said they were increasing their efforts to keep such material off their systems.”
It seems clear that OnlyFans is trying to keep underage material off its platform. Yet the recent exposure of loopholes on Pornhub’s platform being exploited, and the financial fallout that exposure has led to, seems to be making online media hungrier than ever to go after adult platforms online.
It’s disappointing. Especially given that 18-and-up creators who paid their bills using OnlyFans during the COVID-19 pandemic are now in nearly as much danger as those who made money on Pornhub. OnlyFans may have work to do on its systems—and it appears to be trying to do that work—but it is still one of few places where adult creators can retain control over their own content while keeping a hefty 80% of profits. It seems a shame to throw it into the already bloodied waters of online-porn-takedowns so hastily. While governments debate how best to handle regulation of online content, banks, credit card companies, and payment processors are increasingly being called upon to do the regulating themselves—by cutting above-board content creators off from their paychecks. And news coverage aiming to add to the feeding frenzy with sensationalized content like this is not helping matters.
