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Since its launch a decade ago, and throughout its journey to becoming one of the UK’s most successful internet startups, OnlyFans – which was valued at more than £3bn in April – has presented itself as a vehicle for content creators’ empowerment. Revelations of the role played by middlemen in transactions on the website, which is dominated by pornographic content, undermine such claims and require a response from parliament.
A Guardian investigation and a BBC documentary uncovered details of male-run agencies that seek out young women, persuade them to film sexual material, and take 50% of their earnings (all OnlyFans creators also pay a 20% commission to the website). The reporters heard from women who faced pressure to make their content more explicit, and about online networks where managers sell contracts with performers to each other. The BBC interviewed a woman in Wales who was physically attacked in her home.
The picture painted is disturbingly reminiscent of sex trafficking in the offline world – where men are most of the buyers and sellers, women are the main commodity being sold, and grooming, coercion and abuse are routine. There is no doubt that OnlyFans has made some pornography performers rich, and provided an income for many others. In total, the company has paid out around £25bn, and has more than 4m creator accounts worldwide, though it does not publish data about what proportion of content is pornographic. But while the extreme stunts of some performers have faced criticism, MPs have not had much to say about the wider phenomenon. Even energetically promoted “countdowns” to performers’ 18th birthdays – and explicit content debuts – have gone unremarked.
The request for a select committee inquiry into OnlyFans by Tonia Antoniazzi, a Labour MP, and Eleanor Lyons, the anti-slavery commissioner, deserves to be taken up. MPs on the science and technology committee should challenge its executives about the findings. Safeguards around its payments system, the involvement of third-party managers, and decisions around data collection would all benefit from being publicly examined.
There are questions for society, as well as for legislators, about this sexual digital marketplace. In some cases, very young women may be monetising access to their bodies before they have experienced intimacy in real life. But experts are also concerned about pornography’s impact on young men’s ability to form relationships. In their chatrooms and training sessions, OnlyFans managers single out lonely men as a target demographic.
These are worrying trends, and no one should be embarrassed to say so. With its attention-greedy products, the tech industry has made deep inroads into human sexuality, along with other aspects of our lives and relationships. This week, another Labour MP, Jess Asato, called for a legal definition of technologically-enabled violence against women, so that campaigners don’t have to fight a battle each time a novel form of abuse crops up, in the way that upskirting and deepfake porn did.
Police have repeatedly warned that technology plays a crucial role in radicalising sex offenders, and normalising sexual interest in children. It is widely accepted now that the overall regulatory framework around the tech industry has been overly permissive. OnlyFans would make a good case study for MPs on the consequences – and help them to work out what happens next.
