Beginning in October, OnlyFans will prohibit sexually explicit content material on its website—the very content material that made the platform a family identify within the first place.
“To be able to make sure the long-term sustainability of our platform, and to proceed to host an inclusive neighborhood of creators and followers, we should evolve our content material pointers,” OnlyFans stated in assertion to Bloomberg.
As Axios reported, OnlyFans has had points getting traders on board as a result of website’s largely explicit content material. It’s simply one of many many points dealing with corporations that host and/or facilitate the monetization of grownup content material, along with the specter of redlining from cost providers and navigating the controversial legal guidelines Battle On-line Sex Trafficking Act and Cease Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, collectively often called FOSTA-SESTA, which many think about a crackdown on sex workers.
Nevertheless, when Quick Firm spoke with OnlyFans CEO Tim Stokely again in March, he remained bullish on OnlyFans persevering with to host grownup content material.
“We pleasure ourselves, and have from day one, on having a few of the most liberal content material [policies] as to not censor or filter the voices and the content material of our creators,” he stated. “We actually welcome the variety on the platform. That’s not one thing that’s going to vary.”
To make certain, OnlyFans’s new pointers may leave some room for softcore content material. Nevertheless it’s clear that the corporate’s current announcement will likely be one more purge of already marginalized sex workers, a lot of whom noticed this coming a mile away.
OnlyFans’s rise coincided with Patreon altering its pointers round sure sorts of grownup content material in 2017. These adjustments led to many sex workers getting deplatformed, which paved the way in which for OnlyFans, launched in 2016, to develop into the go-to hub for monetizing explicit grownup content material. Nevertheless, many sex workers have feared precisely what OnlyFans is doing now as a result of it’s occurred so incessantly prior to now, not solely with Patreon, but additionally Tumblr and Reddit.
“The issue is grownup content material is all the time below the microscope,” stated Vex Ashley, an grownup filmmaker and artist who was booted from Patreon and migrated to OnlyFans. “And [for OnlyFans] that sadly means the upper you rise, the additional it’s a must to fall.”
She added, “You’re basically simply ready for the sword of Damocles to fall in your head.”
In a method, OnlyFans telegraphed the swing of its sword by making a push into the VOD house with OFTV, an app and streaming platform scrubbed clear on any NSFW content material. However, with this current announcement, it’s clear that OnlyFans sees a full cleanse of explicit content material as its solely approach to develop.
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That stated, it stays to be seen if the transfer will give OnlyFans the expansion it seeks or if eradicating its basis of sex workers will trigger the corporate to crumble.
