Onlyfans Bans Porn..... sort of

[CriticalGaming]

 

[Cheetodust]

I bought a couple of albums direct from an artist's website, and the artist signed them with a personalised thanks as well. It's a small thing I know, but it's a bit of value added.

I have a few merch things I buy. Music was an easy example but I actually don't listen to much and certainly not enough to buy physical albums. I mostly listen to music when I'm walking somewhere or working out. But during covid I did what I could. I kept my subscription up for OTT's (ireland's wrestling promotion) streaming service, even though, no shows meant nothing new to stream because I wanted to do anything I could to offer financial support to a thing I want to succeed.

 

[Gergar12]

I hope they one-day ban investment funds.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

If you wanna go down that route, it's actually mostly Pornhub's fault.

Pornhub has been infamous for a really long time for hosting various forms of illegal and deeply unpleasant content, such as videos of sexual assaults and sex acts involving children. Pornhub itself was incredibly obstructive and slow about getting this content removed, because why wouldn't they be? It's in their interests to leave that stuff up for as long as possible.

The result was a massive public backlash. The New York Times reported on it, and Pornhub's parent company got sued by a group of women who had had videos of sexual assaults against them put there. The "anti-trafficking" (read: evangelical anti-sex-work) lobby got involved, and put pressure on credit card companies to do something about it. As a result of this Mastercard carried out its own investigation of Pornhub, which resulted in it, Visa and a bunch of other credit card companies cutting ties with Pornhub, meaning their cards could no longer be used there. Pornhub responded by removing all content by non-verified users and overhauling its (admittedly really terrible) review system, but the credit card companies didn't back down. Instead, Mastercard is moving to change their policies on adult content so that anyone appearing in that content must have their age, identity and consent verified by the banks which process card payments, which means that any bank allowing payment to sites that host user generated adult content will pretty much automatically be in violation.

That's why Onlyfans wants to ban adult content. They're frightened of ending up like pornhub and being cut off by credit card companies. They're a pretty small fish in the grand scheme of things, and weren't really a part of the conversation before, they're just pre-emptively panicking and making bad decisions as a result, but bad (or malicious) decisions are pretty much the name of the game here.

Same with Onlyfans as it's directly paid for stuff and so big earners will likely face less punishment even for posting illegal stuff. Also the underage users joining the site was happening too on Onlyfans.

 

[Agema]

I hope they one-day ban investment funds.

I find myself more than a little suspicious of the more aggressive hedge funds and other investment vehicles.

Sometimes, they appear to effectively kill companies and yet walk away with huge sums of money: buy them out and saddle them with the debt, do some whizzo restructuring and sell it all off at profit, and then some of those companies collapse and die. If they'd just been left as was, they'd still still be going: but instead they're dead, and the money has been gleefully hoovered up by London and New York.

This has apparently been part of the collapse of care homes in the UK recently - with of course serious problems for the vulnerable people in them and for the country as a whole, as the government has to step in. What's happening is that they are being bought, and the property separated from the care operations. The care provider company then pays the care property company rent: this allows a lot more money to be extracted by the (frequently overseas) property company owners, but threatens the provider company's viability. It's a big fat wealth extraction system that provides worse service at higher cost.

They're after one of the major UK supermarkets. I read a financial analyst point out this supermarket has a relatively unusual model, in that a lot of its supply line is "in house". The likely plan of the fund is to strip the supply services off, source the supermarkets goods from elsewhere for "efficiency", and then sell it on again. But this is really bad news for the UK, and particularly all the home jobs - heavily located in the more disadvantaged areas of the country - potentially to be lost. And once again, this is effectively going to be a great big money transfer from the poor and peripheral provinces of the UK to the super-rich in international finance. I do not think it is a desirable end for the UK, and should be blocked.

 

[Seanchaidh]

Sometimes, they appear to effectively kill companies and yet walk away with huge sums of money: buy them out and saddle them with the debt, do some whizzo restructuring and sell it all off at profit, and then some of those companies collapse and die.

What you're describing sounds like embezzlement.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

What you're describing sounds like embezzlement.

No no, see, embezzlement is illegal.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Same with Onlyfans as it's directly paid for stuff and so big earners will likely face less punishment even for posting illegal stuff. Also the underage users joining the site was happening too on Onlyfans.

What?

Onlyfans processes payments through its site. It receives the money, takes 20% of that money, and then distributes the rest to the users who earned it. That 20% is how this business model makes money. All of these transactions need to be processed by a bank.

Again, Mastercard's policy change would make banks responsible for verifying adult content. Not individual users, not even the site, the literal bank that processes the transaction. This means that banks (those few banks which work with the sex industry at all) are going to be far more wary of any site hosting user generated content. Onlyfans have very openly stated that the reason behind the decision to ban adult content was concerns about finding a bank willing to process payments for them, and strongly implied that the ban being suspended was due to them receiving some kind of assurance from a bank that it would process said payments.

Onlyfans has also implied that they believe they are complaint with the new guidelines from Mastercard, and they are not exactly wrong. New creators are age and ID verified, and content is moderated. The BBC investigation has never denied any of this, it has only focused on the effectiveness of these measures, and while there are still questions there, at the end of the day what do you expect? How do you stop an underage person from using a fake ID? How do you stop verified users from posting illegal content? How do you deal with content that is suspect but not clearly violating the rules? Every site that hosts user generated content faces these problem. For all the problems with Pornhub, for example, they're absolute correct in pointing out that the was far more child porn and illegal content on Facebook than Pornhub, and yet the finance industry isn't targeting Facebook.

Both Pornhub and Onlyfans should have done better. Some of the shit that happened on Pornhub in particular is fucking horrifying. But we should be able to demand better without giving in to evangelicals trying to use the finance industry to punish all sex-workers. Banning sex work, or sites which host sexual content, isn't going to end abuse.