no longer nsfw
August 19, 2021 11:59 AM   Subscribe

Shortly after the news that OnlyFans is launching a SFW version of their app, the company (which has so far earned its founder Tim Stokeley a net worth in excess of $120 million) has stated they will no longer allow sexually explicit content on their main platform (Bloomberg link).

While sex workers have mixed feelings about the platform and the opportunities it has given them, others have criticised what has become the go-to app for countless entrepreneurs (SFW or not). Either way, advocates have pointed out that it will be sex workers who lose out once again. (Though of course, there are always alternatives.)
posted by fight or flight (131 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite


 
Tumblr has a new friend in the VC graveyard!
posted by msbutah at 12:06 PM on August 19, 2021 [78 favorites]


Yes, "get rid of a major source of traffic and income" is exactly how to make your company successful. Tumblr really boomed after removing all the NSFW stuff.

Man, this is depressing. I know several people who will be scrambling again to rebuild their personas on new platforms.

Nothing teaches you that sex work is indeed work like hearing from someone about the actual literal business work that she does to sustain and build her customer base.
posted by Frowner at 12:12 PM on August 19, 2021 [84 favorites]


I'm sorry -- what did the company think their users were accessing it for? Knitting lessons? Dogs riding a skateboard?

Normalize sex work as work. (Because it sure as hell is.) Stop trying to starve people who don't make a living the way you want them to.
posted by Kitteh at 12:17 PM on August 19, 2021 [89 favorites]


The continuing emergence of this new puritanism is extremely concerning
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 12:18 PM on August 19, 2021 [112 favorites]


Nothing teaches you that sex work is indeed work like hearing from someone about the actual literal business work that she does to sustain and build her customer base.

Yup. On a related note, I vaguely recall hearing that some group of sex workers or maybe the relevant IWW branch might be working on an internet platform developed and controlled by sex workers themselves?
posted by eviemath at 12:19 PM on August 19, 2021 [17 favorites]


Is this is another case of conservative money shutting down sex-worker-friendly platforms behind the scenes? Like Visa/Mastercard threatening to pull payment processing for OnlyFans unless they remove the sex-work element?
posted by forbiddencabinet at 12:19 PM on August 19, 2021 [16 favorites]


oh for fucks sake
posted by PinkMoose at 12:22 PM on August 19, 2021 [6 favorites]


WTF? Onlyfans is a porn site. Do they really think they'll have anything left?
posted by yonega at 12:22 PM on August 19, 2021 [26 favorites]


Like Visa/Mastercard threatening to pull payment processing for OnlyFans unless they remove the sex-work element?

I read somewhere that it was to make it Apple-friendly.
posted by dobbs at 12:23 PM on August 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


Like Visa/Mastercard threatening to pull payment processing for OnlyFans unless they remove the sex-work element?

According to Bloomberg (and common sense having watched this happening over and over), yes, this is what's going on. OnlyFans are under pressure from banks and payment providers to change their terms of service, which means eliminating the porn (though users will still be able to post nudes and videos as long as they obey the rules -- probably that means model shots but no actual happy endings or fucking).
posted by fight or flight at 12:25 PM on August 19, 2021 [8 favorites]


One of the great things about having mainstream credit/payment providers pull out is that it makes room for the mob. /s
posted by klanawa at 12:28 PM on August 19, 2021 [14 favorites]


Next step is sell to Yahoo then close up shop 10-18 months later.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:30 PM on August 19, 2021 [32 favorites]


...but having read the Forbes piece I see that Radvinsky is already essentially a mobster, so...
posted by klanawa at 12:31 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


As someone who has never visited, I am only aware of OnlyFans as a porn site. The fact that it has other content at all is the real twist.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:37 PM on August 19, 2021 [77 favorites]


1) Get creators.
2) Get subscribers.
3) Profit.
4) Ban content.
5) ???

I guess getting profitable early confused them.
posted by MattWPBS at 12:39 PM on August 19, 2021 [14 favorites]


Yes, "get rid of a major source of traffic and income" is exactly how to make your company successful.

It is how you get the banks to back your IPO. Do you think any of these guys care what happens to the company much less the people who use the app once they cash out?
posted by thecjm at 12:42 PM on August 19, 2021 [32 favorites]


Making it Apple friendly or credit card processor–friendly seems to me like an exit strategy fed by the usual hot air: "we can totally pivot! when we're free of the sex we'll take an initial hit on income but our addressable market increases by 100x!" Take the VC money and run before the bill comes due and you don't have any users anymore. Sad story for all the amazing folks making a living on the platform; good for the founders who I am sure need the extra $100 million.
posted by wemayfreeze at 12:44 PM on August 19, 2021 [24 favorites]


what did the company think their users were accessing it for? Knitting lessons? Dogs riding a skateboard?

I recently started getting ads from OnlyFans for this exact sort of stuff. "Start your baking tutorial career on OnlyFans!" sort of thing. So yes, they really have been trying to pivot hard to less sexy content in the last few months.

I can't see how it could possibly work, isn't that what Patreon is for?
posted by BungaDunga at 12:45 PM on August 19, 2021 [19 favorites]


Really missed opportunity for the headline, "In First, Bankers Pull Out of OnlyFans"
posted by geoff. at 12:47 PM on August 19, 2021 [41 favorites]


Is there something in the TOS that keeps sex workers from using Patreon?
posted by q*ben at 12:51 PM on August 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Patreon allows nudity but doesn't allow full porn. This is what initially allowed onlyfans to get so popular.
posted by hermanubis at 12:53 PM on August 19, 2021 [7 favorites]


Looks like the originators are just cashing out.

It’s not like the technology is groundbreaking, it will be easy enough for someone else to replicate the business model.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:53 PM on August 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


I can't make sense of this. I'm trying to understand exactly what's happening better than just "American banks are prudes that hate porn". I'm sure that's part of it. But American banks like making money more than they hate porn. And it's not like there's a blanket ban on buying porn with credit cards: the off again on again situation with PornHub suggests it's more complicated.

One reason I've heard for credit card companies hating porn sites is chargebacks. There's got to be a lot of fraud with people buying online porn. But that seems less likely with OnlyFans where folks are signing up for an ongoing relationship, not just a quick video access. Also OnlyFans has been taking credit cards for a long time, so presumably there's a lot of data about the actual chargeback rate? Maybe it's high and they don't want to say so?

The other reason that's explicitly stated in some cases is the concern that some of the porn is illegal; child porn, non-consensual porn, etc. That was the problem for PornHub; the credit card companies started pulling access after the NYT article came out about all the awful and illegal porn they were hosting. Again it's hard for me to see how that applies to OnlyFans, at least in reality. Jumping through the verification hoops doesn't seem that hard; presumably they're already doing tax compliance. Also I'd think OnlyFans would be happy to do verification to have a better product and given how relatively few performers they have how hard can it be?

I just don't understand it. Maybe it doesn't make any rational sense at all.

(I apologize I have not read the Business Insider article; their paywall is the one that I never have figured out a workround for. I did read this summary of the BI article though.)
posted by Nelson at 12:55 PM on August 19, 2021 [16 favorites]


What I don't understand is the banks/credit cards trying to force the issue. Yes Visa is backed by conservative money, but the core tenet of modern conservatives is "social Puritanism right up until it threatens the bottom line." They still get their 4% of every transaction, and OnlyFans is making a crapton of money, which is historically enough to get the regulators to look away, and then for the rules to quietly change a few years later. The only way this makes sense is if the banks are afraid of running afoul of federal laws, like with marijuana dispensaries. Is that what's happening here?
posted by Mayor West at 12:56 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


I wish there were a way to short-sell non-publicly-traded companies, because their demise is the surest bet ever
posted by ook at 12:56 PM on August 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


(Only failure to preview: jinx, Nelson)
posted by Mayor West at 12:56 PM on August 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


It is how you get the banks to back your IPO. Do you think any of these guys care what happens to the company much less the people who use the app once they cash out?

But what baffles me is why the IPO works when the company has just torpedoed one of its most profitable angles. Like, are people just stupid? Is it just passing money around so no one actually cares if there is any profit anywhere?
posted by Frowner at 12:56 PM on August 19, 2021 [21 favorites]


What do other for-profit adult sites do for payment processing?
posted by alex_skazat at 12:57 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


Are they maybe setting up a "bezzle", per the recent post about Uber? "Sure, we'll get out of the porn game", even though they don't have another game to get into?
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:59 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


FOSTA/SESTA are also rather key, here. Look at what happened with Tumblr. There's a large intersecting set of regulations & policy which make this how this will keep going.
posted by CrystalDave at 1:01 PM on August 19, 2021 [19 favorites]


I really hope someone else picks up the torch OF is throwing into the garbage.

OF has been an economic lifesaver for a lot of people who lost work or their entire jobs during the pandemic, from people who were already SWs or models to people who had never done this sort of work before. This is incredibly shitty.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 1:02 PM on August 19, 2021 [11 favorites]


I just don't understand it. Maybe it doesn't make any rational sense at all.

Let me introduce you to the stinking turd left by the Trump administration: FOSTA-SESTA.

Banks don't want to run afoul of this law by implicitly funding sex work, nor do they want to be associated with sites or apps that might be seen to be advertising for sex work (note that OnlyFans explicitly prohibits soliciting for IRL escort services).

(On preview, pipped by CrystalDave!)
posted by fight or flight at 1:04 PM on August 19, 2021 [15 favorites]


I read somewhere that it was to make it Apple-friendly.

They're pivoting from 🍆🍑 to 🍏.
posted by automatronic at 1:13 PM on August 19, 2021 [10 favorites]


Seems like a place for a crypto currency to sweep in and provide a morality free monetary exchange. If it was, in fact, a means of currency.
posted by nickggully at 1:21 PM on August 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


JustFor.Fans (SFW twitter link) has been around for a while. I'm sure today is a banner day for them.
posted by msbutah at 1:25 PM on August 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


As someone who has never visited, I am only aware of OnlyFans as a porn site. The fact that it has other content at all is the real twist.

That was exactly my reaction. I guess they must have other content but it sure isn't what they are known for.

I feel bad for the people who have been able to use it as (from what I have read) fairly non-exploitative platform for working, and now will have to start completely over.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:30 PM on August 19, 2021 [6 favorites]


JustFor.Fans has been around for a while. I'm sure today is a banner day for them.

They’re probably popping a lot of champagne over at LoyalFans, too.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:33 PM on August 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


I’m assuming OnlyFans will soon be mentioned in the past tense, much as BackPage is now.
posted by TedW at 1:46 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


The way it makes sense to me is this: Someone asked a lawyer, "Hypothetically, if there were underage people on OnlyFans, and if, hypothetically they were posting sexually explicit images, and if, hypothetcially, we were hosting, distributing and monetizing that content, what then?" Because I'm sure there are any number of latter day Traci Lords on OnlyFans. Even setting aside young people in abusive and exploitative situations, you can't people making thousands per week on OnlyFans and not have someone decide "I'm not waiting".
posted by Grimgrin at 1:47 PM on August 19, 2021 [4 favorites]


Now if we could get Visa to stop taking Verizon's money for material support of terrorism (bundling Fox News in every package).
posted by hypnogogue at 1:54 PM on August 19, 2021 [12 favorites]


A friend of mine who is a sex worker endorses JustFor.Fans. She says it's made and run by sex workers, provides healthcare assistance, and makes charitable donations.
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:57 PM on August 19, 2021 [50 favorites]


Kitteh: I'm sorry -- what did the company think their users were accessing it for? Knitting lessons? Dogs riding a skateboard?

I thought it was for mating videos.
posted by clawsoon at 2:09 PM on August 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


I really feel for the companies who do credit card processing for porn. They get the worst of the crap from the regulators and from the consumers too. Among other things, porn has crazy high chargeback rates; look at the BBB complaints for CCBill and imagine trying to run that business. As a result, my understanding is that they charge much higher processing fees than are standard in the rest of the industry.

So I don't know what's going on with OnlyFans in particular, but I imagine that issues like this in addition to FOSTA/SESTA make it very hard to run a porn business with the margins of a regular tech company if you're subject to a US/EU regulatory environment.
posted by goingonit at 2:17 PM on August 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


In my Facebook feed I've been getting ads for a while now from Only Fans saying what a great platform it is for creators.

I paint and draw; but I have never, ever considered setting up an Only Fans account for my art.
Ever.

I guess this would be why those ads started showing up. Cretins.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 2:17 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


From Axios, "OnlyFans has tons of users, but can't find investors" (emph. added):
The money it's hoping to raise would partially cash out majority owner and porn mogul Leo Radivinsky, while providing management with what one venture capitalist calls "more legitimacy."

[...]

What follows is rounded data from a pitch-deck that was compiled at the end of March. The 2021 figures are based on run-rate through the end of Q1, while 2022 figures are OnlyFans projections:

[...]

Net revenue:

2020: $375 million
2021: $1.2 billion
2022: $2.5 billion

[...]

Free cash flow:

2020: $150 million
2021: $620 million
2022: $1.2 billion
I went looking to see if I could find any indication of the state of OF's financials to try to figure out why they needed outside funding anyways. According to this Axios article, the answer is "they don't", it's mainly a cash out. But, I don't know how this kind of cash out can work? Why would anyone put money -- not just money, but big-time money -- into a porn-free OnlyFans?
posted by mhum at 2:18 PM on August 19, 2021 [14 favorites]


That's a great article mhum! Honestly though that makes this situation harder to understand. With 1.2B of free cashflow why are they looking at VCs rather than PEs or even just, like, random family offices? The business is already throwing off money, sure you don't get the multiples of a SV firm but do you really care?
posted by goingonit at 2:22 PM on August 19, 2021 [4 favorites]


Why would anyone put money -- not just money, but big-time money -- into a porn-free OnlyFans?

the history of uber seems to indicate there are plenty of people with too much fucking money raring to buy the bridge you have to sell them
posted by Gymnopedist at 2:23 PM on August 19, 2021 [9 favorites]


> Gymnopedist: "the history of uber seems to indicate there are plenty of people with too much fucking money raring to buy the bridge you have to sell them"

True, but I think this situation would be akin to trying to sell someone the Brooklyn Bridge after you've just announced that you're gonna blow it up next month.
posted by mhum at 2:33 PM on August 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


God damn. My heart goes out to all those OnlyFans creators. This is the shits.

I used to make a decent living selling my smutty books on Amazon, until they screwed over authors like me with Kindle Unlimited. (Now, instead of earning dollars per book, it's literal pennies.) That sent me into a financial tailspin for about a year, but things turned around when I started a Patreon. I'm paying about $200 a month in "service fees," which bites, but I make enough to pay the bills. Unfortunately Patreon has made it very clear they're barely tolerating smut on their platform and recently they suspended me for nebulous TOS violations. That was terrifying, having my income yanked away for... reasons. I ended up deleting a whole bunch of content and they eventually reinstated me, but now I live with the constant fear that it could happen again. A bunch of my patrons suggested I start up an OnlyFans and I meant to look into it, but now I guess that option's out. Unlike OnlyFans Patreon probably doesn't need the porn to survive, and I have this sinking feeling that any day they'll announce they're going entirely "family friendly" and all the creators like me will be SOOL.

I've proven I can produce content that is enjoyed by audience of adults, but it's this endless struggle to find a place to sell the damn stuff. It really shouldn't be so hard for a pornographer to make an honest living!
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:38 PM on August 19, 2021 [81 favorites]


It kind of makes you wonder though. Will any platform online that doesn't disallow porn become porn-central?

Wasn't OnlyFans originally founded as a competitor to Patreon?
posted by yonega at 2:43 PM on August 19, 2021


I always wondered why it was such a pain in the ass to make any payments on OF, literally every time I tried I had to deal with several fraud alerts and it was really annoying. Have a few friends who make some or all of their income from OnlyFans, hope they find a better platform ASAP.

Feels better to pay models directly than to use free sites or paying some shitty porn company.

I back some non-porn Patreons but I'm never going to spend a dime on sfw OnlyFans, how foolish of them.
posted by GoblinHoney at 2:45 PM on August 19, 2021 [4 favorites]


The FOSTA/SESTA theory for why OnlyFans is doing this is the one that makes the most sense to me. That badly written legislation makes it so easy to get in trouble for being even vaguely adjacent to prostitution that a lot of companies won't take the risk.

Also this may be coincidence, but this article from eight days ago sure seems relevant. (8 days is awfully fast; I imagine this policy has been months in the coming.) The Congresswoman Behind FOSTA Is Coming for OnlyFans
A letter signed by more than 100 members of Congress on Tuesday is demanding that the Department of Justice investigate allegations of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) on OnlyFans ...

"This is a robust system that works to identify, escalate and report illegal material swiftly. Any claim that OnlyFans does not report CSAM is patently false," the OnlyFans spokesperson said
I'm skeptical that CSAM is a real problem on OnlyFans. Again, there's just not that many performers, screening can be effective. And OnlyFans has been doing their best and has every incentive to. But just the spectre of it possibly being a political issue or legal liability would be enough to scare away investors and banks.

OTOH if you remove all the porn from OnlyFans, really, what's left to sell out with? They're trying to split a hair, allowing nudity but not "sexually explicit content". I can't imagine that's going to work out very well.
posted by Nelson at 2:49 PM on August 19, 2021 [6 favorites]


It kind of makes you wonder though. Will any platform online that doesn't disallow porn become porn-central?

I think it shows that the demand is there — onlyFans shows that the creators (supply) is there, too. Until there are reliable marketplaces and venues for sex work and porn, yeah, new sex-friendly sites will be where people go for it.

Until they get too big and decide they don’t want to deal with it anymore.
posted by wemayfreeze at 2:50 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


the history of uber seems to indicate there are plenty of people with too much fucking money raring to buy the bridge you have to sell them

With all due respect to the creators of the "3. ??? 4. Profit!" meme, there is an absolutely foolproof business plan in four steps. Indeed, it is a summary of every successful business plan.

1. Find someone who has money.
2. Find out what they want more than that money.
3. Make that thing available to them.
4. Profit, inevitably.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:59 PM on August 19, 2021


Does VC money legitimize them or is this a complex accounting or tax scheme? I'm also confused as to why they want cash with so much free cash flow. Certainly someone with a finance or accounting background can explain this.
posted by geoff. at 3:02 PM on August 19, 2021


True, but I think this situation would be akin to trying to sell someone the Brooklyn Bridge after you've just announced that you're gonna blow it up next month.

yeah but that’s just to make room for the zipline!! it’s gonna be great. trust
posted by Gymnopedist at 3:20 PM on August 19, 2021 [7 favorites]


people who wanted to cross the bridge might be disappointed at first but soon they’ll be wrapped up in the cooking demos we’re setting up on the river banks and give us lots of money
posted by Gymnopedist at 3:21 PM on August 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


The government in cooperation with the financial industry megacorps can simultaneously shrink the possibilities and freedoms of the public sphere (and economy) while effectively increasing government censorship activity beyond what is legal via private proxies. Interesting public/private puritan partnership.
posted by srboisvert at 3:23 PM on August 19, 2021 [8 favorites]


"As someone who has never visited" is today's "I only read it for the articles"

Who cares if you do or don't consume/engage with/produce porn?

I hope by the time I die our attitudes about human sexuality have evolved. Here's to consensual, ethical, non-threatening fucking, kinks, or whatever for us all.
posted by elkevelvet at 3:23 PM on August 19, 2021 [36 favorites]


It certainly seems like the current American dream consists of building a business, having it explode, and then having an IPO so you can rake in some quick cash, cash out, and then leave the business to have others run while it rots on the vine and eventually goes out of business or is bought again, or is dissolved or whatever.

American businesspeople are just a bunch of rich jerks playing hot potato with their businesses, and the last one holding the bag loses.

The dream is to cash out big, babay! Fuck what happens after, not your problem!

It's stupid and a scam top to bottom.
posted by deadaluspark at 3:25 PM on August 19, 2021 [11 favorites]


I think the causality's the other way around. Not "We want VC money, so time to burn our premise to the ground", but "if we don't burn our premise to the ground, we'll get locked out of not just Visa/MC but Chexsystems*; so if we're going burn our premise, we'd better raise money while we've still got some shine left on us so we can attempt to pivot"

* This extrapolation comes from their statement mentioning payout systems, and there's not much else in that space. A ban on that level means getting locked out of much of the entire financial system, and can extend to banning executives from being able to get a bank account or credit card for life, with that ban following employees to other companies. This thread from one of the founders of Dreamwidth gets into how bad that can be.

There's also what happened after evangelical groups went after Pornhub, and the policy changes MasterCard went with in its wake.
posted by CrystalDave at 3:26 PM on August 19, 2021 [24 favorites]


Wow, that Twitter thread from Denise is very illuminating (and reassures me that Dreamwidth is still a good place to hang out).

It's pretty nuts that the puritanical executives of a bank or payment provider can wield that sort of power over people, simply because of their moral objections to what's being sold. Nuts but, given that capitalism is a hellhole, also not that surprising.
posted by fight or flight at 3:32 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


As much as I loathe cryptocurrency and the techbros who promote it, it seems to be one of the only things that can keep sex work viable in this VISA/Mastercard hellworld.
posted by deadaluspark at 3:35 PM on August 19, 2021 [3 favorites]




Net revenue:

2020: $375 million
2021: $1.2 billion
2022: $2.5 billion


Why the hell is this company looking for investors, let alone an IPO? If you own a goose that’s laying golden eggs, why would you sell shares in the goose to someone else? Sell the fucking eggs! Keep that shit private!

Even if they’re leveraged to the hilt, they must be servicing that debt easily. And these numbers can borrow tons of cash at low rates. Are they having trouble getting loans?

What can their costs possibly look like? It’s a fucking website. And given the degree they own this market, they could just increase the fees on their content creators if they need more cash.

This doesn’t make much sense unless they’re worried about personal criminal legal liability.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:11 PM on August 19, 2021 [6 favorites]


Not "We want VC money, so time to burn our premise to the ground", but "if we don't burn our premise to the ground, we'll get locked out of not just Visa/MC but Chexsystems*; so if we're going burn our premise, we'd better raise money while we've still got some shine left on us so we can attempt to pivot"

Hate to double-up comments, but that makes sense. They know the revenue is going away, so might as well make a big payday from some wallstreet suckers.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:15 PM on August 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Rebrand as OnlyCrickets.
posted by adept256 at 4:24 PM on August 19, 2021 [7 favorites]


American Conservative leaders

The political leaders who have supported the legislation that has buried things like OnlyFans, BackPage, etc. are completely across the liberal-conservative spectrum. FOSTA-SESTA had overwhelming support: 388-25 in the house and 97-2 in the senate. The stated belief of those who supported the legislation is that it is necessary to stop child sexual exploitation and sex slavery, and they couldn't give one good fuck whether your friendly neighborhood sex worker can make a living if that's what's in the balance.

I think this is profoundly misguided, but I also think that most legislators--progressives and conservatives--are acting in good, though misinformed, faith.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:55 PM on August 19, 2021 [27 favorites]


At last my all- close-up-cat photo Only Fans page with an appropriate double entendre name will have its chance to shine.
posted by Joey Michaels at 4:57 PM on August 19, 2021 [7 favorites]


> CrystalDave: "I think the causality's the other way around. Not "We want VC money, so time to burn our premise to the ground", but "if we don't burn our premise to the ground, we'll get locked out of not just Visa/MC but Chexsystems"

Oh yeah, this makes the most sense. I saw someone on Twitter pointing the finger at Exodus Cry (a anti-pornography and anti-sex work evangelical org) somehow convincing MasterCard to go along with their crusade but I wasn't able to find any solid reporting on this so who knows *shrug emoji*.
posted by mhum at 5:19 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


I have serious reservations about blaming FOSTA-SESTA broadly for all the particular ramifications of, not just what the law does, but how the market is currently choosing to leave money on the table to avoid complying with it.

(I'm reminded of California's prop 65, which I was inspired to actually research after a recent vacation to San Francisco. Turns out those vague and unhelpful warning messages one sees everywhere are not required by that law, rather, they're attempts by manufacturers to dodge it with blanket disclaimers.)

Anyway, what FOSTA-SESTA punctures a tiny hole in is the execrable Communication Decency Act, a corporate giveaway that sold out the free internet in the first place, and the original online free speech controversy that had everyone putting blue ribbon gifs on their webrings. More particularly it weakens Section 230, which gives service providers a "safe harbour" that grants them many of the legal protections of a common carrier while also allowing them to exercise editorial control over their services and profit from user-generated content -- with almost no legal responsibility for how they moderate it.

It's like we live in a world with no sidewalks or parks where one might protest, just shopping malls, all privately owned, and called that "free speech". We should never have become complacent about this status quo. Quite frankly, I see "Facebook finds it too hard to manage harassment and extremism on their site but loves the ad profits" and "OnlyFans is legally required to check their prurient data for illegal content but finds it too hard so they gave up entirely" as two sides of the same coin. We haven't found a way to profitably moderate this web beast we've built our world on, the way it ought to be moderated, but are learning the wrong lessons from that fact.
posted by traveler_ at 5:29 PM on August 19, 2021 [15 favorites]


"As someone who has never visited" is today's "I only read it for the articles"

Who cares if you do or don't consume/engage with/produce porn?


I didn't see it as that, I saw it as a "this is what their brand is, what they're known for." I've never gone there either, but I associate it with porn (and people who have been able to make a living doing what they and other people want, which is good!) The problem for OnlyFans pulling this is that most people see them as a porn site, and no amount of advertising campaigns will get that branding away from them. They cash out, people are losing their income which they had worked so hard to build, and then the platform is going to the graveyard. If I'm going to start a hiking channel, think I'm going to OnlyFans? No, because people aren't going to be looking for me there.
posted by azpenguin at 5:37 PM on August 19, 2021 [20 favorites]


Seems like a place for a crypto currency to sweep in and provide a morality free monetary exchange

Cryptoscrip already has the market cornered on underage sex and snuff, apparently. Lots of room for morality-free business transactions.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:46 PM on August 19, 2021


Anyway, are the founders taking cash or stock? Cash suggests they are cashing out. Stock would imply staying in for the long haul. Either should indicate longer-term behavior.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:48 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


Didn't Twitter used to let you click on show this thread without demanding some sort of login? Or am I just old and misunderstanding this newfangled blue Twit thing?

Anyway, King of the internet Checkmark Tingle has weighed in


Chuck Tingle
@ChuckTingle
·
4h
gross antisexwork talk today from those who should know better. it is not jokerman way to tease buds who use onlyfans to provide service and will now need a new home as they lose platform. sexworkers made onlyfans into large company and
@onlyfans
should be ashamed of banning them
posted by Jacen at 6:11 PM on August 19, 2021 [17 favorites]


> What can their costs possibly look like? It’s a fucking website.

Gee willikers, is it still 1990, and I can host a website off the computer that's already in my basement, for free? It's not? Lets assume that Snap(chat) is roughly as complex to run (which, OF has a messaging feature and hosts media-heavy content, so that doesn't seem wildly wrong). In Snap's 2017 IPO, they said their hosting costs were going to be $2 billion over five years. I'm sure that simply dividing 2/5 to get a cost of $400 million a year is wrong, but it's good enough to say that maybe websites are expensive to run these days.

> As someone who has never visited, I am only aware of OnlyFans as a porn site.

You don't have to be engaged with porn in any way to know there's approximately infinity porn available, for free, on the Internet. So then, what drives people to pay for content on OnlyFans? Charisma on Command goes into this a bit with a YouTube video, which I found informative, because I had no idea the level of casino-ization of the place. (I give zero fucks if you actually believe that I don't have an OF account. Go watch that video and tell me it's wrong about how the place works in practice. or not.)

> I have serious reservations about blaming FOSTA-SESTA broadly

I'm not sure why OF is choosing to make this move, and whether it's being driven by FOSTA or Visa/MC (my vote's Visa), but I will point out that FOSTA-SESTA includes jail time for CEOs for companies engaged in sex trafficking, (which resulted in Backpage closing down, which lead to sex workers getting killed, but that's a total derail). Leaving money on the table is one thing, but facing jail-time is another.
posted by fragmede at 6:16 PM on August 19, 2021 [11 favorites]


when Chuck Tingle is the voice of reason you done fucked up good.
posted by deadaluspark at 6:23 PM on August 19, 2021 [11 favorites]


You don't have to be engaged with porn in any way to know there's approximately infinity porn available, for free, on the Internet. So then, what drives people to pay for content on OnlyFans?

I always assumed it was about developing "relationships" between creator and ... punter ... where the customer felt they had a connection to the performer that isn't present in Big Porno.

I do wonder if there is a business opportunity here for a company that is instituted and processes payments under the flag of a nation with fewer scruples. Don't think I could make it happen but it feels like a billion dollars just got dropped on the floor and all you have to do is snatch it up.
posted by dis_integration at 6:44 PM on August 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


This is one of those "ha ha, what?" things that the worlds just keeps dealing out these days.
posted by turbid dahlia at 6:48 PM on August 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


Also:

but it's good enough to say that maybe websites are expensive to run these days.

Snap has some pretty unique challenges with ~300 million users all sharing video with each other. I'm not sure how big onlyfans is but it's a broadcast model (far more viewers than creators) and this makes things much simpler. I'd bet OF hosting fees are below $1 million a year.
posted by dis_integration at 6:51 PM on August 19, 2021


> I'd bet OF hosting fees are below $1 million a year.

Hah! The salaries of just their five best IT people probably cost more than that. OF's hosting and IT/devops/SRE staffing costs are probably on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.
posted by riotnrrd at 6:57 PM on August 19, 2021 [11 favorites]


There's a fundamental issue that I don't think user generated sexually explicit content at scale can ever be moderated at any level of what's considered safety, honestly.

OnlyFans says it has on the order of 2 million creators and is adding over 100,000/month. I'm sure there's a very long tail with this, but with more than 300 making over $1 million a year and 16,000 making over $500,000/year, the scale of stuff to be moderated in that tail seems kind of unimaginable. And the moderation (itself a grueling form of labor) challenges are wildly difficult; we're talking about people who need to review a gazillion hours of material and somehow address wildly complex and awful problems like CSAM, underage creators, revenge porn, and so on. Whatever very very small fraction of the total library of content is headline-worthy horribleness, it will never be 0, which is society's expectation for the amount of profit you're allowed to make off gamifying the above abuse.

That society's standards are different around the acceptable error rate when the platform is intended for sex work vs. other social medial networks, email, image hosting sites, and so on is significant here. Yes puritanism is a part of the reason for that, but I don't think it's the only factor there. That the demise of a large moderated platform only drives the same activity to more dangerous unmoderated platforms is the flip side to that, of course.

There are hopefully co-op models that some sex workers can build for themselves and have slightly more control over their own fates (though they too will be reliant on ISPs and credit card processors), but it seems kind of inevitable that anything that scales to the level of a "platform" where a single entity is responsible for more sexually explicit content than can be tracked in one spreadsheet is going to be considered fundamentally unsustainable.

There's a school of thought that large social media platforms operate at too big a scale to exist responsibly and so they shouldn't. Is OnlyFans that theory in action?

I do wonder if there is a business opportunity here for a company that is instituted and processes payments under the flag of a nation with fewer scruples. Don't think I could make it happen but it feels like a billion dollars just got dropped on the floor and all you have to do is snatch it up.

There are only so many gateways to the "legitimate" financial system. Doesn't matter where in the world you go: if you want to accept payments via the methods most people have conveniently available and you get big enough, your bank will wonder what you're up to and start asking questions about what kind of risk you pose to their business. You can take this to hilarious extremes for a while setting up shell corps and seeking out partners with fewer and fewer scruples (see, for instance, the extreme example of Bitfinex, where you eventually wind up doing business with money launderers who steal your money), but at the end of the day, some risk-averse big bank in the US can tell your tiny little unscrupulous bank "don't do business with these people or we'll cut you off" and that's going to be the end of that.

There's an important phrase in OnlyFans' announcement: "banking partners and payout providers." The whole thing only works if there are "payout providers" willing to work with you: financial institutions that will transfer money from OnlyFans to content creators. Imagine you're one of those. You get the chance to skim a small fee off the top of these transfers in exchange for the risk someone will call you up one day and say "so do you know who you just wired money to and what that was for?" Whether that call comes from the banks you rely on to stay in business or basically any prosecutor somewhere in the world, is that really a customer you want? That's the calculus here.
posted by zachlipton at 7:09 PM on August 19, 2021 [15 favorites]


Hi from an adjacent district in Missouri. Ann Wagner's seat is up again. State Rep Trish Gunby is running against her.
posted by fluttering hellfire at 7:21 PM on August 19, 2021




Mod note: A couple removed; this thread is about onlyfans specifically, and not about the morality of sex work in general.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 7:47 PM on August 19, 2021 [7 favorites]


the execrable Communication Decency Act, a corporate giveaway that sold out the free internet in the first place

An ironic comment to make on an Internet forum like Metafilter which would have a hard time existing without the Section 230 protection of the CDA. Although at least MeFi is well moderated, it might have a better time of it than most social media.
posted by Nelson at 7:50 PM on August 19, 2021 [8 favorites]


This BBC story kind of taking credit for this announcement ahead of this investigative report is of significant interest. OnlyFans: Platform to ban sex videos after BBC investigation
Internal documents, leaked to BBC News, reveal that OnlyFans allows moderators to give multiple warnings to accounts that post illegal content on its online platform before deciding to close them.

Described as a "compliance manual", the documents also show that staff are asked to be more lenient towards successful accounts on the British content-sharing service.
[...]
BBC News was able to set up two subscriber accounts in French and German - despite explicitly stating they were young teenagers in the bios and advertising the sale of photographs. The accounts remained active for a week until BBC News contacted OnlyFans.
posted by zachlipton at 8:34 PM on August 19, 2021 [4 favorites]


Chuck Tingle seems to always be the voice of reason, far as I can tell.... No matter how much he cloaks it in his unique lingo.
posted by Jacen at 8:42 PM on August 19, 2021 [25 favorites]


BBC News was able to set up two subscriber accounts in French and German - despite explicitly stating they were young teenagers in the bios and advertising the sale of photographs. The accounts remained active for a week until BBC News contacted OnlyFans.

I don't know how it works overseas but for me to get a job in the United States I have to go through I9 verification. Since the pandemic, this usually involves going to a UPS or authorized center to verify I am the same person I'm on my ID. It gives the organization some sheen of plausible deniability.

Are they saying that an organization with hundreds of millions -- billions -- of free cash flow can't do a simple ID check? Even DoorDash and Uber have some sort of verification process. This seems especially important in an industry notorious for trafficking and abusing women. All OF had to do was do some modicum of moderation: manually check bios, manually check IDs. I'm sure there's Traci Lords out there that would abuse the system. But just check to make sure they're not claiming to be underage?!
posted by geoff. at 9:36 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


Are they saying that an organization with hundreds of millions -- billions -- of free cash flow can't do a simple ID check?

So the accounts in question are “subscriber” accounts: customers. These accounts do not require age verification and cannot accept payment. “Creator” accounts that can receive payments are age-verified.

The BBC set up subscriber accounts that claimed to belong to minors with profile text that advertised the sale of photographs. Any sale would have to be offsite, though.

There are *real* problems with OF, but honestly, I could set up a $5 profile on Metafilter and I’m pretty sure the moderators wouldn’t notice if I gradually modified my profile text to say that I was 14 years old and selling pictures of my feet.
posted by mr_roboto at 9:54 PM on August 19, 2021 [13 favorites]


I don’t think the moral opinions of bankers have anything to do with their resistance to doing business with this type of content. It is just about the fact thst they can’t make money because of chargebacks, fraud cases, and legal compliance issues.
posted by interogative mood at 10:23 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


An ironic comment to make on an Internet forum like Metafilter which would have a hard time existing without the Section 230 protection of the CDA

Further irony is that basically anyone who complains about CDA safe harbor would really not like what the Internet would look like if it went away. There would be sites like MeFi and maybe some newspapers would publish selected comments after vetting like letters to the editor. Most sites with user generated content would probably go the cheaper (and safer) route of not moderating at all. Since not moderating means no liability under the case law Section 230 was passed specifically to overrule, I'm really not sure how anyone thinks repeal would be better than the status quo.

OF's issue is a completely different one, however. Most likely some prosecutors leaned on someone in the financial services chain. Quite possibly Visa and MasterCard, since they're the only ones who can make it impossible for OnlyFans to do business with any processor or merchant bank at any price. Even if OF did lose access to ACH and equivalent money transfer services overseas, they could still pay performers through Visa and MasterCard, just with a percentage fee rather than a flat fee per transaction in exactly the way Cash App and PayPal do instant transfers.
posted by wierdo at 10:40 PM on August 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Also, I'm not sure how chargebacks bother the bankers. That's why they hold back a substantial amount of your incoming payments to cover the cost of any reversed charges, charge higher rates to process your transactions, and charge you a decently sized fee for every chargeback. It's literally impossible for someone like OF to lose money for them directly. Pissing off the regulators, or even risking that possibility on the other hand...
posted by wierdo at 10:49 PM on August 19, 2021


for me to get a job in the United States I have to go through I9 verification.
That seems like a lot of work. Any time I've seen that, it's been "Do you have ID? Yup. Do you say the ID has you on it? Yup. Good enough"
posted by CrystalDave at 11:27 PM on August 19, 2021


Excessive chargebacks have been used to demonstrate evidence of knowledge of illegal activities by the regulators.
posted by praemunire at 12:06 AM on August 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


This was an interesting thread from someone who claims to have been in a similar position to OnlyFans. tl;dr the executives of OnlyFans are probably facing a personal blacklist as well as a company one, and it sounds like they may also have attracted the attention of US government clearance orgs as well, who can ban someone from the banking system.
posted by Merus at 2:37 AM on August 20, 2021 [1 favorite]




I think there are a few things going on here that make this situation particularly complicated. (Please note that when I say "complicated", I don't mean "less of a steaming pile of shit".)

SESTA/FOSTA is absolute garbage legislation that does way more harm than it does good. Proof that the average Senator/Congressperson is, what, 70+?, and completely doesn't understand the Internet—it's almost Vonnegut levels of hilariterrifying.

That said, I understand why it was such popular legislation: the "sex-adjacent" parts of the Internet are Wild Westian in their shocking lack of anything resembling legal or ethical codes. Sex trafficking is not only common but happens more-or-less out in the open, exploitation and abuse of women is rife, and on the flip side, women who are successful receive "astonishing" levels of abuse and threats. ("Astonishing" because, you know... not astonishing.) It's amazing that there are more and more places online where sex work has found pockets of civilization, but the success stories, while inspiring and hopeful, are by no means the norm.

Shit's still real bad. And while I agree with the median MetaFilter user that fixing that shit needs to start by legalizing sex work, that combination of well-meaning ignorance has typically been a grim one for humankind.

Anyway, there's a separate thing going on here, and it's the gig-ification of sex work. OnlyFans works like Uber or DoorDash or what-have-you, in that their workers are not only interchangeable but promised a hope for employment that rarely actually pans out. I know a lot of women who've tried to go the OnlyFans route, and really pushed themselves to make it work; their success rates are abysmal. And the usual cottage industries spring up around that: the people who'd sell you guides to "making it", the success stories at the top who'd like to thank Ayn Rand for teaching them that success was inevitable and failures deserve to rot, etc.

In other words, the backbone of OnlyFans has always been the same crooked deal as other gig-economy start-ups: you get to tell yourself an entrepreneur, but you have to swallow all the risks and losses and we'll get to profit off the successes.

It's also, even more broadly, got something in common with Silicon Valley businesses in general: investors care way more about the technology than about the "product". The ones who are investing don't foresee a "pivot" to cooking videos: they just care that OF has a robust(ish) platform for letting users distribute different types of content to different paid tiers, for managing livestreams and video content, for dealing with community interactions within the silo, etc.

It used to be popular to say that digital apps were so incredible because you can build an app one time and distribute a million copies without needing a factory. Well, imagine if cars worked the same way, and you gave the same car to ten million people, and then someone else went "Oh, I like that steering wheel" and yanked it out and suddenly those ten million people didn't have a wheel. There are parallels, not only to a broad swath of other consumer platforms, but to what's happening in journalism: companies are bought and stripped for parts. The only difference is that in Silicon Valley, the original creators do the selling and the stripping—their userbase, if anything, served as a proof-of-concept for the business deck.

None of which is to say that this isn't also about faux-moral outrages, economic complications revolving around bad legislature and sex work, banks holding frightening amounts of power which they wield inveterately, etc. But these were not new issues when OnlyFans became big, this new pivot didn't happen overnight, and I'd be willing to bet that conversations about doing exactly this were held well before OnlyFans actually had anything resembling a functioning platform. You could see this coming from a mile away. This is maybe the most popular kind of exit strategy in tech:
  • The users fund the development of the platform, and grow the brand
  • The platform has worth, and the brand has name recognition
  • The name and the tech are held to have value; the users are voiceless and nameless
  • What few users do establish brand recognition are "recession-proof", and blame all the other users for not weathering the storm
See also Uber claiming that its "real" business plan involves firing all of their gig workers, or Tesla's valuation being largely based, not on its cars, but on its car cameras, the idea being that enough Teslas on the road will eventually map out the whole of America and lead to AI procedurally emerging itself. Even in the case of buying a literal physical car, the actual user is just a patsy for some grander tech-platform-related scheme.

Sex work! Tech! Two great tastes that go together like ammonia and bleach.
posted by rorgy at 3:36 AM on August 20, 2021 [17 favorites]


FOSTA-SESTA includes jail time for CEOs for companies engaged in sex trafficking, (which resulted in Backpage closing down, which lead to sex workers getting killed, but that's a total derail). Leaving money on the table is one thing, but facing jail-time is another.

Whatever else can be said about FOSTA-SESTA, it's sure proving that laws making executives personally responsible are effective at getting regulations taken seriously.
posted by automatronic at 3:57 AM on August 20, 2021 [11 favorites]


Small data point: when discussing the future of sex work, it's important to note that many sex workers and advocates around the world are pushing for decriminalisation, not legalisation. They are two separate concepts and shouldn't be used interchangeably. The difference is explained in this NS article:
Some clarification: under legalisation, sex work is controlled by the government and is legal only under certain state-specified conditions. Decriminalisation involves the removal of all prostitution-specific laws, although sex workers and sex work businesses must still operate within the laws of the land, as must any businesses.
posted by fight or flight at 4:58 AM on August 20, 2021 [22 favorites]


The congresswoman leading the charge against OF is the "chair of the suburban caucus" from Missouri. And secretary of the 'twiddling your thumbs' committee, I suppose
posted by eustatic at 5:55 AM on August 20, 2021


This is a pretty informative twitter thread about credit card policy and OnlyFans. TLDR: It's not great and the de facto outcome is likely to be big companies being the main ones who can sell sexual images. This makes me worry about the post-OnlyFans independent landscape.

What I hate about all this stuff? That everyone (anti-sex-work left and the right) who wants to get rid of sex work has no interest in income replacement for the sex workers. Like, it's bad to get rid of OnlyFans not because OnlyFans is so great but because it creates precarity. People who do most sex work do it primarily for the money; people who have a vocation tend to do more niche stuff. If you want to cut down on sex work in order to get rid of really-existing misery and exploitation you don't need to mystify everything or crush people with the law; just give workers money.
posted by Frowner at 6:45 AM on August 20, 2021 [14 favorites]


Chargebacks are bad for banks for a few reasons. One is that they are taking on financial liability -- if they can't get the money back from the merchant they have to eat it. Another one is that the chargeback process is expensive for them, since there can be a lot of manual interaction: fraud calls from the purchaser, disputes from the merchants, etc. Given that they are only getting pennies per transaction, they have a big incentive to boot out merchants with high chargeback rates.

However, this is a "solved" problem in that there are processors who specifically focus on the sex industry and will take higher fees in exchange for not booting you for stuff like this. Which is why the policy changes from the interchange networks are so important: you can get a new payment provider but you can't get a new interchange network. Imagine if porn sites only took Discover.
posted by goingonit at 7:27 AM on August 20, 2021


They are two separate concepts and shouldn't be used interchangeably.
under legalisation, sex work is controlled by the government and is legal only under certain state-specified conditions. Decriminalisation involves the removal of all prostitution-specific laws, although sex workers and sex work businesses must still operate within the laws of the land, as must any businesses.
Fascinating. This is exactly backwards from what I thought, which was along the lines of the associated Wikipedia article, although I’m thoroughly unsurprised that sex work would be treated differently.
Legalization is the process of removing a legal prohibition against something which is currently not legal.

Legalization should be contrasted with decriminalization, which removes criminal charges from an action, but leaves intact associated laws and regulations.
posted by zamboni at 7:36 AM on August 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


That Twitter thread Frowner linked is worth a read, Among other things it includes references: here's an article about the Oct 2021 Mastercard changes for adult sites. Among other changes
All content must be reviewed prior to publication, or real-time if it’s livestreamed, and no content can violate the Card Brand BRAM (Business Risk Assessment and Mitigation) policies
posted by Nelson at 7:44 AM on August 20, 2021 [4 favorites]


(Not to derail too much, but

Onlyflans

would be an awesome, though no doubt far too niche to be financially lucrative, new web site. Even the inevitable heated arguments over which types of custard qualify as a flan would be amusing, I think.)
posted by eviemath at 7:58 AM on August 20, 2021 [5 favorites]


>All OF had to do was do some modicum of moderation: manually check bios, manually check IDs.

It's not quite that simple. Mastercard's rules require review of all content prior to publishing, and real time monitoring of all streaming content.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 8:08 AM on August 20, 2021 [1 favorite]




922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a: "Twitter thread on the why"

From this thread, QFT

If I tell you that putting a shoe on your head will prevent sex trafficking, is that a good thing?

MasterCard was pressured by organizations that want to "eradicate all porn."

They do not care about, or know how to fight, actual human trafficking.

posted by chavenet at 8:29 AM on August 20, 2021 [3 favorites]


Legalization should be contrasted with decriminalization, which removes criminal charges from an action, but leaves intact associated laws and regulations.

Everything I've heard about 'decriminalization' (in the US) means that it turns acts (like marijuana possession and sex work) into misdemeanors, which carry no immediate jail time and no max penalty of jailtime unless fines assessed are not paid. They are still completely illegal. Essentially fine by the police and move on.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:29 AM on August 20, 2021


That "Mastercard is moving to new rules that make porn a lot more hassle" article on Xbiz really feels like one of the smoking guns here.

I find myself wondering if it's one of the smoking guns in Apple's controversial launch of a new feature that'll scan everything on your iThings for child porn and report anything it thinks might be that, too.

What a mess.
posted by egypturnash at 8:34 AM on August 20, 2021


Let me introduce you to the stinking turd left by the Trump administration: FOSTA-SESTA.

I think it is really important to not pin this solely on the Trump Administration. An insufficient analysis makes it so much harder to do anything about a broken system.

Throwing sex workers under the bus is one of the few intersections of bipartisan collaboration left in modern American politics. 97 senators voted yea on H.R. 1865 (including Booker, Harris, Sanders, and Warren).

The only two that voted nay? Ron Wyden and...Rand Paul (lol broken clocks).

The OF news is directly related to FOSTA/SESTA (and the generally inequitable AML laws/regulations set by the US government). Like banks, payment processors like Visa and Mastercard are highly incentivized to be as conservative as possible when it comes to who they take money from because federal and state regulators love nothing more than fucking over sex workers, drug dealers (who aren't the Sackler family), and anyone else who operates outside of the modern capitalist economy.

I don't understand why people are surprised or upset by this. "Anti-trafficking" laws are far more about hurting working-class immigrants and sex workers than actually doing anything about the systems of inequity that enable trafficking to occur in the first place.
posted by Ouverture at 8:39 AM on August 20, 2021 [13 favorites]


Everything I've heard about 'decriminalization' (in the US) means that it turns acts (like marijuana possession and sex work) into misdemeanors, which carry no immediate jail time and no max penalty of jailtime unless fines assessed are not paid. They are still completely illegal. Essentially fine by the police and move on.

At least for pot, that's not true. In US states that have decriminalized, it's legal (under state laws) to grow and sell as long as you're licensed by the state. Consumers can legally buy from licensed dealers and possess up to a certain amount, which is usually what was previously the limit for a misdemeanor when it used to be criminalized.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 8:43 AM on August 20, 2021


At least for pot, that's not true. In US states that have decriminalized

This getting pretty far into a derail, but let's look at how Wikipedia's Legalization of non-medical cannabis in the United States uses the terms:
Decriminalization refers to a policy of reduced penalties for cannabis offenses, typically involving a civil penalty for possessing small amounts (similar to how a minor traffic violation is treated), instead of criminal prosecution or the threat of arrest. In jurisdictions without penalty the policy is referred to as legalization, although the term decriminalization is sometimes used for this purpose as well.
Different groups/countries/jurisdictions mean different things by legalization and decriminalization. For the purposes of this thread, it's probably better to be specific about the policy you advocate, and avoid confusion by not using these overloaded terms. With that said, let's get back to the main topic.
posted by zamboni at 8:59 AM on August 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


The government banning content it doesn’t like from the banking system may really backfire. Once there’s a critical mass of supply and demand excluded it will support a robust alternative, but one that by its nature won’t be able cut out illegal activity along with the merely (seen by some as) antisocial.
posted by MattD at 9:06 AM on August 20, 2021


The government banning content it doesn’t like from the banking system may really backfire. Once there’s a critical mass of supply and demand excluded it will support a robust alternative, but one that by its nature won’t be able cut out illegal activity along with the merely (seen by some as) antisocial.

Banning grey market economies leads to those affected workers turning to black market economies, which ironically makes it far more likely for abuse, violence, and exploitation to happen (see...human trafficking and the war on drugs).

And it affects far more women than only the sex workers:
[W]e find evidence that ERS significantly reduced female homicide rates by as much as 10-17 percent. We do not find evidence that this was a more general reduction in homicide, as ERS is unrelated to male murder, females killed by an intimate partner, or manslaughters. This strengthens our assessment that ERS-driven changes in sex markets were the primary driver of the reduction in female murders.
posted by Ouverture at 9:16 AM on August 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


An ironic comment to make on an Internet forum like Metafilter which would have a hard time existing without the Section 230 protection of the CDA.

Very ironic. I also live on land stolen in a genocide and own a smart phone that may or may not have been built with slave labor. One can't criticize this world without also living in it.

I don't really want to repeal section 230, but I do dream about renegotiating its terms. Metafilter is great but I remember the internet pre-1996 and all the various ways it was in the transitions between then and now. I think it's worth remembering it can be different and that the status quo, which is increasingly hard to participate in civilization without engaging in, and which Metafilter does not represent, already moderates like a heavy-handed newspaper where it suits them and not much at all where civil rights come in.
posted by traveler_ at 10:01 AM on August 20, 2021 [2 favorites]


Vinny Thomas reads a statement from OnlyFans. (It's humor, and if you don't know Vinny, his look of intense discomfort reading this is a shtick.)
posted by Nelson at 10:50 AM on August 20, 2021 [3 favorites]


Imagine if porn sites only took Discover.

That would probably be great for Discover.

Mastercard's rules require review of all content prior to publishing, and real time monitoring of all streaming content.

Is there some sort of carve out for non-adult enabling sites? IE: does Master Card not require this of my knitting Only Fans cause if not it would be nice to have one viewer.
posted by Mitheral at 3:59 PM on August 20, 2021 [1 favorite]




OnlyFans shares its new policy banning sexually explicit content. Some details on the new policy.
Do not upload, post, display, or publish Content on OnlyFans that:
Shows, promotes, advertises or refers to “sexually explicit conduct”, which means:
actual or simulated sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, between persons of any sex;
actual or simulated masturbation;
any exhibition of the anus or genitals of any person which is extreme or offensive;
actual or simulated material depicting bodily fluids commonly secreted during sexual conduct;
So it's OK to post hole as long as it's not "extreme".
posted by Nelson at 7:15 AM on August 21, 2021


refers to “sexually explicit conduct”

I wonder if this will be like the instagram ban that flags your account if you use certain words or certain types of emojis together in a post. The sex workers and nsfw artists I follow on there have become quite creative in asking people to tip them for content.

actual or simulated

I guess this means nsfw artists who are drawing/animating content are also screwed by this policy. Great.
posted by fight or flight at 7:54 AM on August 21, 2021


actual or simulated material depicting bodily fluids commonly secreted during sexual conduct;

Uncommon sexual fluids A-OK
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 10:22 AM on August 21, 2021 [2 favorites]


An ironic comment to make on an Internet forum like Metafilter which would have a hard time existing without the Section 230 protection of the CDA.

Metafilter seems like one of the few forums on the Internet which would do okay without 230 protection, and it seems like that is directly related to the fact that Metafilter has decided to go with the combination of active, intelligent moderation and barely scraping by financially.

I'm no expert, though.
posted by clawsoon at 10:40 AM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]




I always wondered why it was such a pain in the ass to make any payments on OF, literally every time I tried I had to deal with several fraud alerts and it was really annoying.

Yep. I tried to sign up once a year back and it went through some payment validation song-and-dance rigmarole, so I wouldn't have been able to sub to the creator(s) for like two or three days. I can't think of anybody who, in the heat of the moment, signs up to get porn in a few days.
posted by turbid dahlia at 8:59 PM on August 22, 2021


Update: My friend no longer endorses JustFor.Fans, as the owner and co-founder has been revealed to be a serial sexual predator. Apparently we can't have nice things.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:44 AM on August 23, 2021 [5 favorites]


In an interesting turn of events, OnlyFans has reversed the decision and will continue to allow explicit content:
On Wednesday, the company said it “secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community,” suggesting that it has new agreements with banks to pay OnlyFans’ content creators, including those who share sexually explicit material.

“Thank you to everyone for making your voices heard. We have secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community and have suspended the planned October 1 policy change,” the company said in a tweet Wednesday.

“OnlyFans stands for inclusion and we will continue to provide a home for all creators,” the company said.
posted by fight or flight at 5:41 AM on August 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


Wow. Great if it works out in a straightforward way, and a real blow to the evangelicals.

On twitter, lots of people have been pointing out that eradicating [safer, better-vetted, more worker-controlled] sex work is just the thin end of the wedge - the fundies want to get rid of GLBTQ content, feminist content, basically everything that doesn't match their worldview, and the easier it is for them to exclude sex workers from the internet the more they're encouraged to go after everyone else.

If I could add anything to those lists of common reasoning errors that they hand out in, like, Accounting 101, I'd add "the belief that you can define and isolate one sector of society from the rest". It's like unions - you might like your co-worker Joe or you might think he does a terrible job and has annoying habits, but if you let the bosses discriminate against him, they'll be coming after you soon enough.
posted by Frowner at 7:43 AM on August 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


There have been a couple of thoughtful articles about how the OnlyFans thing is just one part of an American religious campaign against sexuality. NYTimes: How OnlyFans Became the Latest Casualty of the War on Porn and New Republic: Nick Kristof and the Holy War on Pornhub.

The Guardian's article on OnlyFans reversal is also worth a read: OnlyFans scraps plans to ban sexually explicit material. Both it and the Variety article emphasize comments the OnlyFans CEO made in a Financial Times interview yesterday (summarized here)
“The change in policy, we had no choice — the short answer is banks,” Stokely said. Banks including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of New York Mellon and the U.K.’s Metro Bank “cite reputational risk and refuse our business,” he said. ...

“This decision was made to safeguard [creators’] funds and subscriptions from increasingly unfair actions by banks and media companies — we obviously do not want to lose our most loyal creators,” Stokely told the Financial Times.

Stokely also said that OnlyFans is “fully compliant” with new Mastercard rules, so that had no bearing on the decision to ban porn. He also said the change was not made to appease investors.
That's more or less what a lot of us have been guessing at here, but it's good to have the CEO on the record about it.
posted by Nelson at 8:02 AM on August 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


Frowner: "the fundies want to get rid of GLBTQ content, feminist content, basically everything that doesn't match their worldview, and the easier it is for them to exclude sex workers from the internet the more they're encouraged to go after everyone else. "

"First they came for OnlyFans, and I said nothing, because I've never been to that site before you guys honest and what is it even for btw haha."
posted by Rhaomi at 11:10 AM on August 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


« Older indie game dev burnout glitchless any% WR speedrun   |   The Shadow of the Crown Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments