The decision by the creator platform OnlyFans to soon stop hosting a wide swath of sexually explicit content is sending shockwaves through the internet.
OnlyFans,
a website with 130 million users and more than 2 million content
creators, has become synonymous with pornography. For many, performing
on the app is a lifeline: Some who lost their jobs during the pandemic
turned to sharing explicit videos of themselves on OnlyFans to help pay the bills. Many of these sex workers are now expressing outrage at what they view as OnlyFans's betrayal of a community that enabled the platform's massive success.
Venture capital firms are often wary of investing in platforms that host adult content. According to internal documents obtained by Axios, OnlyFans' popularity and revenue both exploded during the pandemic, yet it has struggled to secure outside investment.
OnlyFans'
decision is also a result of a much wider and concerted crackdown in
recent years across explicit parts of the internet, one driven largely
by a group of powerful and increasingly assertive companies: The payment
processors who, behind the scenes, handle every swipe of your credit
card whether you're paying for gas, buying groceries or tipping a
performer on OnlyFans. In
its announcement this week, OnlyFans said its decision was driven with a
view toward building a sustainable platform for the long term. "These
changes are to comply with the requests of our banking partners and
payout providers," it added. OnlyFans' decision to attribute its policy change to payment companies
reflects how the financial sector has increasingly leaned against sites
that share adult content. But the issue, they say, is not one of mere
prudishness, but legal exposure.
Credit
card companies are growing increasingly conscious of their own
potential legal exposure if they are accused of
facilitating sex trafficking or the spread of child sexual abuse
material. Last December, Discover, Mastercard and Visa all announced that they would suspend payments to Pornhub, one of the web's largest porn sites, following allegations
that the site had hosted child sexual abuse material. In response,
Pornhub scrubbed its site of all videos that weren't produced by
verified partners and implemented a verification program that all users would need to undergo if they wanted to post adult content. Though Visa later agreed to restore service
to some adult sites owned by Pornhub's parent, MindGeek, Pornhub itself
remains cut off from credit card processors; the platform still only
accepts payment by direct bank transfer and cryptocurrency.
The
financial industry's muscle-flexing has drawn criticism from digital
rights advocates who argue it's throwing its weight around. "Visa and Mastercard, acting together, are currently a choke-point for online payments," wrote the digital rights advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"This means that every arbitrary policy of these two companies can
translate into rules that all websites who want to process payments must
follow."
"The real villains here are the payment processors, the silent shadowy
blacklisting cabal that dictates the kind of moral behavior we're
allowed to engage in, who, without any sort of oversight, can wipe any
company they wish out of existence," tweeted one San Francisco-based OnlyFans creator who goes by @Aella_Girl.
Payment processors are well within their rights to determine what
transactions they will and won't support on their networks. In that
respect, they are not that different from platforms such as Facebook and
Twitter, who are massively powerful in their own right, said Danielle
Citron, a law professor at the University of Virginia studying online
content moderation and who also helps lead the Cyber Civil Rights
Initiative, a group that advocates against non-consensual porn. "Payment processors have considerable power over sites like OnlyFans and
Pornhub," she added. "They're private companies. But should we be
worried about the kind of power they have?"
No comments:
Post a Comment