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.
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. Credit card companies are growing increasingly conscious of their own potential legal exposure, McNamara added, if they are accused of facilitating sex trafficking or the spread of child sexual abuse material.
Platforms would be required to verify the age and identity of those who were posting and who were depicted in online porn, Mastercard said, and would have to have a process to review adult content before it is posted. Adult sites would have to offer a complaint process that can"address" illegal or non-consensual content within seven days, and offer ways for people depicted in adult content to request takedowns of that content.
"Visa and Mastercard, acting together, are currently a chokepoint 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.