OnlyFans: Oops, Just Kidding; Keep Posting Sexually Explicit Material
from the backsies dept
So, last week the news broke that OnlyFans, the wildly popular platform for "subscribing" to private video and photographic content -- and whose most popular usecase appears to be for adult content -- announced that it was banning "sexually explicit material" in response to difficulty finding investors and payment processors/banks threatening to cut them off (and possibly rejecting too many payments). The whole thing was somewhat confusing because the company did say that nude imagery would still be allowed, just not "sexually explicit," and I'm sure the guidelines for the company's content moderation team on that distinction would have been quite something.
Either way, this move lead to an outcry of complaints -- led by sex workers who were already quite reasonably pissed off at previous attacks on them via things like FOSTA. And now, OnlyFans has announced that it has dropped the plans to ban such content, and said that it had worked out some sort of agreement with the financial companies who had been causing trouble before:
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.
OnlyFans stands for inclusion and we will continue to provide a home for all creators.
— OnlyFans (@OnlyFans) August 25, 2021
I've seen some people concerned about potential "backlash" to this from moral panicky and grandstanding "morality" police, but if we did everything to make those people happy, we'd shut down a ton of important innovation and creativity.
Still, this does keep some key questions in play about just how powerful a few small financial firms are, and how they can effectively control how other businesses operate. I imagine that conversation is not going away any time soon.
Filed Under: adult content, banks, content moderation, payment processors, sexually explicit
Companies: onlyfans
