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.
I hate bullshit clickbait like this article. These are horror stories about sex trafficking and slavery, not about OnlyFans. Crap like this is what killed Craigslist’s adult personals. At the time, it had become a tool for sex workers to come out of the shadows and be free of pimps and slavers. All the closing of Craigslist’s sex work section did was hurt sex workers. Articles like this aim to do the same to platforms like OnlyFans.
As long as sex work is illegal, it will be easy for people to find ways to abuse sex workers.
Making sex work legal won’t stop slavery - plenty of modern day slaves exists today in nail salons, fast food, cleaning, factory work and so on in every city in every Western country.
Making something illegal almost never outright stops it
It does make it significantly easier to regulate a market if it’s legal than if it’s not, so the EXTRA illegal shit goes down when markets are legalized
It can help, yes - but a large percentage of the 38 to 49 million modern day slaves still exist in otherwise fully legal businesses.
Awareness of slavery is still really low amongst many people. It’s going on everywhere, not just in the sex business and is very difficult to stop.
Fun fact: the majority of people trafficked in the world are for sex purposes, so if you make it far easier to shut down that market, it damages all the other slave markets too
I get that you’re trying to bring awareness or whatever but both comments so far read more like “not worth legalizing sex work when other slaves still exist”
What’s the source for this, please?
My own research points to the fairly reputable https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery/ which estimated around 28m in modern slavery (on the low side of other estimates), and of those, 6.3m are in commercial sexual exploitation, less than a quarter.
I absolutely am trying to do that - it seems to be ignored by almost everyone, something that I personally find shocking. Even when raising the figures here - usually a place full of people with more empathy than most social media, the response has been partly negative. Maybe because people don’t seem to want to acknowledge the bigger problem. I don’t get it. Perhaps the numbers are so huge it’s hard to appreciate that each one of these is a human being who’s trapped, alone and suffering.
That wasn’t the intention.
Way to add literally nothing to the conversation. This post wasn’t an invitation to get on your sopbox.
Thank you for your own deeply considered and valuable contribution.
Prison slaves in the woods fighting a California wildfire. MERICA!
Literally lmao
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.
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.
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.
Have you seen PeerTube? It’s a good attempt, but even with the P2P-style sharing, they are experiencing 100x the problems that Lemmy has here because of the sheer amount of bandwidth and storage they have to deal with from a tiny micro-fraction of a percentage of the content that YouTube or OnlyFans serves.
Right now, large corporations are the only ones with the resources to even attempt such a thing, unfortunately.
Meanwhile, in the real world, creators just want to setup an account and sell their content. Not having to deal with payment processors, setting up cdns port handling customer support themselves.
There’s enough to complain about how OnlyFans impacts society (like creating fake interactions with customers who think they’re interacting with the real deal). But them wanting a cut for doing all the technical middleman stuff is actually reasonable.
Well there’s no point in going after the worst criminals right?
We gotta ban Only Fans and TikTok and probably a whole bunch of other apps!!! \s