Laws often protect web giants while victims struggle for justice

October 15, 2024 12:32 AM

Fifty-six agencies provided records in which adults alleged that sexually explicit photos and videos had been posted to OnlyFans without their consent. Fifty agencies declined to provide records, citing privacy laws, technical limitations and other factors. Others did not respond, said they had no relevant records or provided records that were not relevant to this story. Using the law enforcement files, along with some state and federal court cases, reporters identified 128 cases of women and men who complained to police that sexually explicit images or videos of themselves had been posted on OnlyFans without their permission. Reporters conducted detailed interviews with nine people who made those allegations. from Behind the OnlyFans porn boom: allegations of rape, abuse and betrayal [Reuters] [CW: Rape, CSA, sexual content, NSFW text]

PART 2 OnlyFans vows it’s a safe space. Predators are exploiting kids there.
PART 3 OnlyFans’ porn juggernaut fueled by a deception
PART 4 Sex bomb: The collateral damage of OnlyFans’ explosive success

posted by chavenet (14 comments total)

There are a lot of anecdotes and personal stories. I think I got at least two takeaways from the series, but there are other angles as well:

--Since all content is paywalled by definition, and there's no search function at all, it can be more difficult to investigate abuse unless you have a specific lead.

--Since there are no ads, the company is very dependent on credit cards. If Visa and Mastercard decide they don't want to be associated with OnlyFans, that could be a more damaging move for OnlyFans than when Visa/MC stopped working with Pornhub (which is mentioned).
posted by gimonca at 4:42 AM on October 15 [1 favorite]

As AI fakes become ubiquitous, you could soon just claim all your nudes online were AI fakes, but that'll dramatically worsen the part 4 scenario someone spends all their money.

If law enforcement has probable cause for a warrant, then they could force access via OnlyFans of course. If otoh they have any reasonable suspicion that OnlyFans might sanitize some account, then surely they could simply pay by credit card, and then order the credt card company reverse the charges in compliance with the original warrant.

I suppose cops ignore these cases, either because they do not care, or because they do not know how to download, but a paywall should present no obstacle against a warrant. Indeed, law enforcement outside the US could simillarly obtain their flavor of warrant, so then their local credit card issuer would reverse the charges in compliance with their local court orders.

It almost sounds like cops got lazy because now they can download so much without obtaining warrants. If law enforcement caused enough chargebacks, then OnlyFans might explore better processes more agressively themselves.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:00 AM on October 15 [1 favorite]

From Part 4:

"Although all U.S. states except West Virginia criminalize bestiality..."

If anyone asks me what unusual or interesting fact I learned today, I have an answer.
posted by Major Clanger at 6:52 AM on October 15 [10 favorites]

As AI fakes become ubiquitous, you could soon just claim all your nudes online were AI fakes

This will help in some cases but I don’t think it’s anywhere near sufficient. Someone who is worried about their nudes becoming public is worried about other people’s reactions, and that means that for the rest of their life they have to think about whether anyone they know has seen them and whether they believe that the images are real or doesn’t care either way. That’s a real ongoing cost to the victims and in some fields could be quite stressful (e.g. teachers have to worry about getting fired even if the cause is betrayal by a former partner).
posted by adamsc at 7:02 AM on October 15 [3 favorites]

Coming back to a point I made in another thread, we have this line in the first article:

Repeated efforts by the U.S. Congress to pass federal laws that criminalize nonconsensual porn have failed, largely due to objections by free-speech advocates.

If you want to know why I'm done with free speech "absolutism", this here is Exhibit A. It is ridiculous that we can't make this sort of abuse illegal because when it's been tried, you get a chorus of how doing so will "chill speech", while ignoring how the victims of this have had their speech and lives chilled.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:50 AM on October 15 [9 favorites]

"Although all U.S. states except West Virginia criminalize bestiality..."

Really it's a different spin on 'Country Roads'...
posted by kaibutsu at 8:18 AM on October 15 [3 favorites]

It almost sounds like cops got lazy because now they can download so much without obtaining warrants

For child porn, the big tech companies share effort and productively report what they find to police. There's obviously limits to that approach: we probably don't want companies collaborating on too many things, sharing use data too freely, or collaborating too freely with the cops.

But the same underlying technical system seems like it would be helpful for dealing with nonconsensual porn: a shared blocklist database of hashes of media that should not be distributed. (Even if it doesn't get reported to the cops.) This wouldn't help with deep fakes, though.
posted by kaibutsu at 8:31 AM on October 15 [1 favorite]

we don't get much traffic from West Virginia this far north and west, but those license plates do catch the eye:

WEST VIRGINIA - THE BESTIALITY STATE
posted by philip-random at 8:54 AM on October 15 [2 favorites]

But the same underlying technical system seems like it would be helpful for dealing with nonconsensual porn: a shared blocklist database of hashes of media that should not be distributed.

The problem with sexual abuse via nonconsensual release of intimate media* is a matter of will and of ideology. Laws have been proposed, and they wind up withering on the vine because free speech "absolutists" kick up a shit fit over how such a law would "chill speech", while ignoring how this abuse chills the speech and lives of the victims.

I also thought the third part was interesting, with the discussion of how much of OnlyFans' success is predicated on "pig butchering"**, which is something that I hadn't thought about.

* I really don't like terms like "revenge porn" and "nonconsensual porn", as I don't think they convey that this really is abuse, or play on the "all porn is abuse" trope. The problem is that trying to frame the term in terms of abuse is...incredibly clunky.

** For those who haven't heard of the term, "pig butchering" is a form of con/scam where the scammer uses the idea of a romantic/intimate relationship to bleed the mark of money and gifts.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:21 AM on October 15 [2 favorites]

From TFA (3rd link) and also re: "pig butchering"

Then Kunz started noticing strange things. She seemed to forget subjects they’d already discussed – a recipe for overnight oats, a picture of her own cats. He started asking questions.

“Who are you?” wrote Kunz, who allowed Reuters to read his OnlyFans chats with Nikki.

“What do you meann, babyyy?” came the reply. “It’s meee!☹️”

Kunz slowly realized he was chatting to more than one person.

This past weekend I had lunch with a friend who had been recently dating an Onlyfans performer.

My friend said that one of the stresses in their relationship was that she was always on call -- she had a whale going who was providing a critical chunk of her income, and if the whale messaged, she really needed to respond -- the whale could get needy and impatient.

("whale" is our term, not hers -- she said "fan")

knowing from personal experience how fucking destructive a 24/7 on-call expectation can be, I don't begrudge any sex worker who engages subcontractors to handle their sexy / romantic chat marketing. That's just deception icing on top of the "this sex worker sees me as more than a client" deception cake.
posted by Sauce Trough at 9:55 AM on October 15 [2 favorites]

He also sought to support her in other ways. Every month, for six or seven months, he gave her $200 in “pocket money” through OnlyFans’ tipping function. He gave her money to pay for medicine and car repairs, he said, and paid a monthly subscription of about $10.

In total, he said, he spent about $7,300 on Nikki. OnlyFans takes a 20% cut of all such revenue.

He now thinks various chatters strung him along to keep the money coming in. “They used my love for her against me,” he said. “From where I stand now it looks like a big romance scam.”

This is what makes it not okay. I think. Because part of the 24/7 expectation comes from the perception being created on the part of the sex worker that she cares about him so much that she is making herself available to him so often, during those hours, that she is as eager to talk to him as he is to talk to her. That’s what makes him pay the extra to send for medicine or car repairs or other things. And those connections are based entirely on a lie. It’s absolutely unjust enrichment. It’s not like someone paying a sex worker to pretend they’re like a girlfriend, or for the duration of the encounter to act like the girlfriend, and then at the end of the encounter, to get back to business. It’s someone who is acting the entire time. The fact that chatters are told to entice more money out of marks by claiming they want to be “spoiled”, like a girlfriend would be “spoiled”, is absolutely horrifying.

And there are real victims here besides just the men. Men who are tricked in this way are more distrustful of actual women and human engagement overall. Intimate deception is one of the most damaging deceptions and it takes the longest to recover from. These scams are possibly permanently damaging people’s ability to trust in exchange for a quick payday. That’s different than an honest exchange of sex for money.
posted by corb at 10:38 AM on October 15 [5 favorites]

Non consensual sexual pictures are a problem.

But what is the plan for dealing with a situation where a person claims bikini pictures are non consensual sexual pictures? Pictures taken from a publicly online music video, Where she was paid to be in the video.

Because she was 'friends' with a CEO of a social media firm she was able to have discussion over the pictures deleted and people got banned.

Rather sure the solution isn't the vision of Project 2025 but if pictures that might have Speaker Mike Johnson have a confession to his son that would help address the non consensual sexual pictures issue by banning the showing of skin.
posted by rough ashlar at 1:03 PM on October 15 [1 favorite]

But what is the plan for dealing with a situation where a person claims bikini pictures are non consensual sexual pictures? Pictures taken from a publicly online music video, Where she was paid to be in the video.

Because she was 'friends' with a CEO of a social media firm she was able to have discussion over the pictures deleted and people got banned.

That falls under "social media platforms get to set their own rules", which is part of the freedom of association (which, by the way, is another thing that free speech "absolutists" tend to have a problem with.) There is nothing wrong legally with her asking the head of the company to intervene, nor is there anything legally wrong for the head to choose to (and in fact in the US they are explicitly indemnified for doing so.)

This argument is an outright non sequitor, and is the sort of swan dive down the slippery slope that we see way too often in discussion about free speech to make the argument that abuse is the price of such.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:22 PM on October 15 [2 favorites]

It’s not like someone paying a sex worker to pretend they’re like a girlfriend, or for the duration of the encounter to act like the girlfriend, and then at the end of the encounter, to get back to business. It’s someone who is acting the entire time.

Yes, that's correct. They are acting the entire time. The illusion of intimacy is the performance the client is paying for. This is a guy who signed up for a service for ten bucks a month, plus whatever pay-per-view fees and tips, and expected not only explicit videos but one-on-one live chat with the performer. That's not a romance scam, it's a parasocial attachment. The system is absolutely designed to exploit that, and I agree it's harmful when the illusion shatters, but "They used my love for her against me" is just classic male entitlement. No, dude, you were lying to yourself about what you signed up for.

A friend of mine has sex with men for money, and with a lot of her clients it's the same thing. They want sex, but they also want endless amounts of unpaid emotional labour before and after the appointment. They message her at all hours and expect her to coddle them and stroke their egos, for free. They want her to pretend she's into them, and they get pissy if she does something that breaks the illusion, like setting a boundary or asking to be paid. Sometimes they try to turn it into a "real" (i.e. unpaid) relationship, and when she declines, they disappear. Good clients remember the arrangement is transactional ("an honest exchange of sex for money"); bad clients delude themselves and then resent her for it.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 2:47 PM on October 15 [1 favorite]