The Role of OnlyFans in Human Trafficking

If you’ve been online in the past few years, you have almost inevitably come across references to OnlyFans and the adult content it hosts. What you may not have thought about is how the website might be connected to sex trafficking.

The platform is a giant in the online world, boasting a staggering 187.9 million users and 2.1 million content creators as of 2021. Many users — and the company itself — pitch the platform as empowering. But as advocates against sexual exploitation, we have to carefully educate ourselves on the true role of OnlyFans and even ask if the platform enables human trafficking. Let’s explore the connection.

When it launched in 2016, OnlyFans touted itself as a social media revolution. Its subscription-based model places creators’ content behind a paywall, hypothetically ensuring that they get paid for what they post (while OnlyFans itself takes a generous 20% cut). The platform skyrocketed into public awareness during the COVID-19 pandemic when many people found themselves dependent on the digital world for connection, entertainment, and making enough income to stay afloat.

But the rapid rise has been fraught with controversy for the platform, which has quickly become known primarily for hosting adult content. That content ranges from subtle fetish photos to hardcore pornography. Protests about the lack of regulating this explicit material combined with pressure from banking institutions led OnlyFans to announce a ban on adult content in 2021 — only to reverse it mere days later.

Now, the platform operates in an uneasy cultural gray area: is this kind of sex work safe, or is it enabling abuse?

Publicly, OnlyFans decries trafficking and exploitation in all its forms. In their 2022 Anti-Slavery and Anti-Trafficking Statement, they state, “We are committed to acting with integrity and mitigating the risk of modern slavery and human trafficking in our business dealings and relationships with our creators and fans.”

Their transparency policy also states, “If any user does try to engage in modern slavery and human trafficking on our platform, we know who they are, we report them to law enforcement and NGOs, and we ban them from OnlyFans.”

These published policies have led to the claim that their space is “the safest digital media platform in the world.”

Although the language itself is laudable at face value, the reality is that policy does not necessarily equal implementation. How closely does the activity that actually happens on OnlyFans reflect their stated values?

It’s true that OnlyFans requires age verification — guidelines that became stricter after the 2021 controversy. However, that age verification is easily bypassed, the same way it would be when a teenager uses a fake ID at a club. 

An extensive investigation by the BBC yielded story after story of kids under 18 joining the platform and using it to generate and sell Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). As a reminder, per the U.N.’s definition of human trafficking, no child can consent to any kind of sex work. Any time a child is abused in that way, it’s trafficking.

OnlyFans did tighten things up after the time of that investigation, but kids keep slipping through the cracks. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation has compiled extensive case studies on likely trafficking and abuse that they found on the platform, including rampant CSAM.

One of the most sobering statistics about this trend comes from Staca Shehan, who is the Vice President of the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children. In 2021, she told the BBC, “In 2019, there were around a dozen children known to be missing being linked with content on OnlyFans. Last year the number of those cases nearly tripled.”

With so much online sexual abuse of children being filmed and streamed, it makes sense that predators would be drawn to subscribe. In a revealing interview with the New York Times, OnlyFans pimp Jayson Rosero admitted to marketing to the demographic interested in girls who are on the border of legal.

Unfortunately, it’s easy for minors to be lured onto the platform so that content can be created. One very common method is via the “Romeo pimp” or “boyfriending” model, in which a romantic partner showers a teenager with affection in order to manipulate them into recording sex acts on OnlyFans. Sometimes, this coercion involves two teens. Other times, it’s a much older person grooming a youth. 

An investigator told the BBC that within an hour spent on other social media platforms, he found 10 CSAM images that had first been hosted on OnlyFans. They said, “The youngest was around five years old… Whatever their [OnlyFans’] current methodology, there’s still cracks that it’s still slipping through.”

That experiment also illuminates the risk that a teenager might share content on the service where a predatory viewer can record it and then sell it off-platform to others — again, a form of trafficking.

There’s also an inherently dangerous quality to the platform’s cultural narrative, a narrative where anyone can get rich quick from just a few sexy minutes a day. That story can be immensely compelling to teenagers who may not have the tools to discern that those promises are illusory and illegal. 

In reality, the average creator on OnlyFans doesn’t get rich quickly. They make an estimated $180 every month. 73% of the platform’s total revenue comes from just the top 10% of their creators.

Ultimately, the mythos of OnlyFans can normalize sexual experiences that are abusive and risky. This is not to imply that teenagers need to be restricted from all conversations about sexuality, but normalizing sex work in the absence of education on consent, legality, and safety is egregiously harmful.

OnlyFans alone isn’t responsible for the glamorized notions around its platform. In an experiment by the Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative, profiles were established purporting to be minors on Instagram, SnapChat, and TikTok. The algorithms in their feeds quickly delivered OnlyFans content, funneling users there with one or two clicks. Serving teenagers this kind of romanticized vision of explicit content creation can lead them onto the platform and into situations where they’re vulnerable to exploitation. Clearly, this is a societally embedded pipeline into a loss of safety for kids, who cannot legally consent to participating in sex work.

A spokesperson for OnlyFans told Vice that they have internal technology used to assess abusive material, whether that be of underage participants or individuals who bore physical signs of abuse which could signal coercion. However, the constant flood of sex trafficking cases involving OnlyFans would indicate that those technologies are only moderately successful. 

There is also a very legitimate question to be posed: how motivated is a platform to remove exploitive content when they’re profiting from that content? At best, this raises concerns about complicity. At worse, it positions OnlyFans as a pimp or trafficking entity. 

In a whole host of cases, technology that relies on visual cues alone is unlikely to be sufficient anyway. Like what was mentioned above by Rosero, there is a whole new class of pimps who masquerade as “management” for OnlyFans influencers. 

As a report from investigative journalists at Prism explains, “These agencies seek out OnlyFans creators to profit off their content, claiming they can improve the income of individual OnlyFans creators for a percentage of their earnings… security experts say that should a sex worker relinquish control over her bank account to an agency, there is potential for coercive control practices against the recruited creators.”

To the outside observer (or A.I. tool), the photos and videos posted on these tightly controlled accounts would seem totally consensual. But the reality is that the individuals pictured may not even be the ones doing the posting, setting the prices, or ultimately taking home the paycheck.

We have to acknowledge another major problem with the policies in place to moderate content on OnlyFans: because of the paywall feature inherent in its business model, ultimately, only OnlyFans itself has unfettered access to choosing who can see what. This means that if law enforcement needs to investigate, the cost and the time involved is prohibitive. 

Most police departments are already shorthanded when it comes to having the personnel to do in-depth investigations into online sex trafficking cases. When you add the factor of a paywall to gather evidence of exploitation, the task goes from hard to near-impossible.

The Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative, in partnership with Awareness is Prevention, performed one of the most in-depth analyses of abusive material on OnlyFans. This required subscribing to multiple relevant accounts. 

“Researchers from AIP expended several thousand dollars in just two hours to access paywall-concealed content essential to the UNH analysis,” the report said. “In addition to CSAM and sex trafficking, much of the content discovered appears consistent with law enforcement’s observations relating to violent sex acts, including images and videos that at minimum may depict forced rape and criminal assault.”

To be clear, OnlyFans is not unique in the fact that it hosts CSAM and sex trafficking content. Nearly every major platform online does. In fact, the majority of the cases that The Exodus Road worked in 2023 involved data collected online.

The difference is that on platforms like Facebook, X, or Instagram, there is significant open-source information that can be scraped to build a case file. If someone makes a report to law enforcement or social services, they can quickly and easily assess if it’s a true threat.

OnlyFans does not allow that simple access, demanding instead that the public trust their word when they say they’re catching anything illegal. Even if OnlyFans does not have the highest volume of trafficking taking place on its channels, it does put up the most barriers to any help coming for someone who is suffering exploitation.

Those who desire to defend OnlyFans rightly want evidence that isn’t just anecdotal. Unfortunately, that evidence exists in spades. When images produced via sex trafficking are sold, the real cost is the pain of the people who are being exploited.

• This Florida girl was 16 years old when a couple exploited her on OnlyFans. A friend recognized her in a pornographic video and contacted police.
• In Georgia, a woman had explicit footage of her sold without consent by a 38-year-old man. The trafficker simultaneously used OnlyFans and X (then known as Twitter). 
• 30 boys in junior high in Texas accepted a friend request from a Snapchat account, only for it to be flooded with explicit content taken from OnlyFans. The adult couple running the account were arrested.
• Starting at just 13, a girl was trafficked to New York. Her trafficker assaulted her and sold the footage on OnlyFans. Two years of abuse elapsed before she was found.
• A woman in Florida was severely abused by a man who demanded that she create an OnlyFans profile — making it clear that he’d be keeping all the money.

Then there are the survivors of now-infamous influencer Andrew Tate, the women still seeking justice after Tate forced them to produce content on OnlyFans. Monstrously, his accomplices threatened and fined the women if they dared display any sign of emotional distress on camera.

These stories are uncomfortable and painful to read. They’re also only the tip of the iceberg. For every story we do eventually hear about trafficking and exploitation that lurks on OnlyFans, there are likely to be dozens more that we’ll never hear about because of their paywalled structure.

In light of the problems and the controversies that plague OnlyFans, what’s next for this entertainment giant?

The reality is likely simple: either they acknowledge their complicity, find better ways to monitor their content, and hold themselves accountable to others, or else they will likely go the way of now-defunct websites like Backpage and Omegle. 

There is an ongoing dialog about what could be lost if legal, consenting sex workers no longer had OnlyFans. They might be pushed to work in more dangerous face-to-face situations. The right to safely create that kind of content is a legal one. But we have to ask: at what cost? Shouldn’t we aspire to a better solution than trading sex workers’ safety for the safety of sex trafficking survivors?

In an important and insightful New York Times conversation between survivor activist Jamie Rosseland and legal sex work veteran Cherie Deville, all parties reached the same conclusion: no one who legally uses OnlyFans wants to prop up trafficking. More than likely, the platform itself even believes its own anti-trafficking statement — even if they aren’t implementing it.

“I believe that there are monsters in every industry,” Cherie Deville acknowledged. In recognition of Rosseland’s exploitation, Deville added, “I was an adult with advanced degrees who made a very thoughtful choice and contacted lawyers and did all of my due diligence before joining an industry that I had very carefully decided to join. And it seems like you had no such autonomy in your decision.”

Confirming that experience, Rosseland shared, “And so what’s freedom for one person may just be another platform of exploitation for another person… In my personal story, you could have looked at it and seen agency or autonomy. And I may have even told you at the time that I had agency or autonomy. But what was happening behind the scenes, what was happening when I returned to wherever I was staying, was very different.”

In short: just because the legal users of OnlyFans don’t see exploitation, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. And just because OnlyFans isn’t catching a lot of sex trafficking, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

In light of the way OnlyFans is enabling exploitation, what can we practically do to change an ingrained paradigm?

First of all, anyone who uses OnlyFans (whether it’s for adult entertainment or not) has a responsibility to interrogate their media habits. Fight the New Drug offers great resources on how to consider your consumption in order to be fully aligned with your values and the health of your relationships.

Even if you’ve never used OnlyFans, the likelihood is high that you have someone in your life who might be vulnerable to exploitation. Consider ways you can support those most vulnerable to trafficking: women living below the poverty line, foster kids and LGBTQ+ youth, migrants, and indigenous women. Are there ways that you can meet their needs or connect them with someone who can?

Another relational step is to have shame-free, nonjudgmental conversations with the kids in your life about the complexities of navigating sexuality in the digital space. Those conversations include warning about the dangers of trafficking but also encompass so much more. If you want a way to get started, we created a resource for you: learn more about Influenced. 

You can also take legislative action. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation has been revealing some of the risks of OnlyFans. They’re hosting a plea to the U.S. Attorney General to investigate the content on OnlyFans. You can add your signature. 

None of us are helpless in creating a safer world for each other. In communal support and mutual care, there’s a chance to demand a higher standard of humanity — even from giants like OnlyFans.