sex work

OnlyFans has reversed its decision to ban porn

But creators and sex workers are still feeling burned and say they no longer trust the company.

The OnlyFans website on a laptop screen.

OnlyFans reversed its decision to pan born.

Photo: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images

After days of outrage from creators, OnlyFans announced on Twitter on Wednesday that it had suspended its decision to ban pornography in October because it had "secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community."

The company said last week that it would ban sexually explicit conduct because banks and payment processors had made it too difficult to support creators who shared porn on the platform. Sex workers immediately began to leave the platform in droves, furious with the company for abandoning its creators.

After the porn ban was first announced, some creators said that the company has as long history of failing to protect women from harassment, discrimination and other complaints about illegal activity, and that they believe the platform has long failed sex workers. Both creators and other porn companies also said they didn't believe OnlyFans' claims that banks and payment processors were to blame for the decision, and that the company could have found a way to continue to offer porn while abiding by those rules.

"The proposed October 1, 2021 changes are no longer required due to banking partners' assurances that OnlyFans can support all genres of creators," the company said in a statement to Protocol.

The new suspension of the ban has not changed the minds of sex workers feeling burned and abandoned; many said they will continue to transition away from OnlyFans and no longer trust the company's assurances on Twitter and Reddit forums. "I do think that those of us who can move sites regardless should since OF have proven time and again that they don't care about the SWs on the platform," one creator wrote.

"The whole site has always been not so kind towards the creators who built it up," another sex worker told Protocol after OnlyFans' reversal was announced. "The site and its management have never been trustworthy in my opinion and I'm already in the process of leaving the site, suspended porn ban or not."

Despite creators' anger, OnlyFans may manage to salvage the accounts of some sex workers because the platform provides a more favorable financial deal and more popular forum than any other equivalent site. OnlyFans only takes a 20% cut of the payment made to its creators, while competitors tend to take 30% or higher. It could also be very difficult for some sex workers to persuade paying subscribers to move to other platforms while OnlyFans retains some porn. Even when the company first announced its ban, many sex workers said online that they were struggling to persuade their subscribers to move right away, and hoped the total absence of porn in October would be the final push.

"OnlyFans has shown it doesn't care about the adult industry. It has shown this time and again. So if they reverse course now, who is to say they won't reverse course in 3 months? Adult content content creators deserve a platform they can really on, and one which does not cause them constant anxiety," Dominic Ford, the founder of JustFor.fans (an OnlyFans competitor), told Protocol.

This is a developing story and may continue to be updated.

Anna Kramer

Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.

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