OnlyFans gives women the chance to earn money by making porn. Sex traffickers also use the platform to abuse and exploit them, say police and prosecutors. The accused range from social media influencers to cash-hungry boyfriends. “I don’t think I’ll ever be fully healed,” said one victim.
On an August morning in 2022, a young woman slipped out of a house in suburban Wisconsin and dashed to a waiting police car. Her hands shaking, she told officers it was the “most brave thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
For nearly two years, her boyfriend had held her captive, prosecutors say. She feared he’d kill her if she tried to leave. But just days earlier, after he’d poured hot grease down her back, she started plotting her escape, secretly messaging family and friends to alert police.
The young woman later explained her desperation to detectives: Almost every night, her boyfriend had forced her to record sex acts on camera to sell online. Among his chosen outlets was OnlyFans, the hugely successful website famous for porn.
The difference is that, unlike craigslist, OnlyFans takes a massive 20% cut of all revenue. For comparison, Patreon takes a little more than 5%. Purely from a labor perspective, that’s outrageous, so I do think that it’s fair to demand that they at least do more to justify it, which ought to include protecting the people that actually do the work.
There’s also what’s to me the bigger problem: OnlyFans obviously didn’t invent online sex work, but it did radically reshape it. They are responsible for mainstreaming this patreon-style, girl-next-door porn actress that people expect to interact with on a parasocial level. Those are features that OnlyFans purposefully put in to maximize their own profit, but they seem particularly ripe for the kind of nauseating small-scale abuse that the article discusses in depth. Suddenly, if an abusive partner wants to trap and control someone, there’s a mainstream, streamlined path to making that profitable. Again, OnlyFans didn’t create that, in the same way that Uber didn’t create paying some random person with a car for a ride to the airport, but they did reshape it, systematize it, mainstream it, and profit handsomely off it. Craigslist was just a place to put classifieds, but OnlyFans is a platform that governs every detail of these relationships between creators and fans, down to the font of their DMs. If the way that they’ve built the platform makes this kind of abuse easier, that’s a huge problem.
I agree with you that this article doesn’t do a good job articulating any of this, though.
Video streaming is not cheap. Petabytes and petabytes of data transferred, stored, streaming, networked, etc., etc. YouTube is already barely profitable and only from pissing off their audience and streamers.
A comparison to Patreon isn’t fair at all because they have almost no infrastructure to speak of. What do they actually do? Host a web site with some forum software on it? Handle subscriptions and emails, with a light bit of payment handling? Really?
Oh no the corporations can’t afford to host! Guess we will have to create the tools to self host our own shit then.
Yes, they banned Craigslist ads in order to spawn something even more exploitative. Let’s see what happens after they ban OF. (seriously though no.)
About that 20% cut - I’m not going to argue about what amount would be fair, but for that money they do handle all the payment, distribution and infrastructure. In that sense it’s more comparable to Steam, Apple, Google etc.
But that’s getting pretty off-topic.
I agree that it’s like Apple and Google (I don’t know much about Steam) in that those are obvious price-gouging monopolists.