96
Enslaved on OnlyFans: Women describe lives of isolation, torment and sexual servitude (www.reuters.com)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml
24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

OnlyFans gives women the chance to earn money by making porn. Sex traffickers also use the platform to abuse and exploit them, say police and prosecutors. The accused range from social media influencers to cash-hungry boyfriends. “I don’t think I’ll ever be fully healed,” said one victim.

On an August morning in 2022, a young woman slipped out of a house in suburban Wisconsin and dashed to a waiting police car. Her hands shaking, she told officers it was the “most brave thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

For nearly two years, her boyfriend had held her captive, prosecutors say. She feared he’d kill her if she tried to leave. But just days earlier, after he’d poured hot grease down her back, she started plotting her escape, secretly messaging family and friends to alert police.

The young woman later explained her desperation to detectives: Almost every night, her boyfriend had forced her to record sex acts on camera to sell online. Among his chosen outlets was OnlyFans, the hugely successful website famous for porn.

top 24 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 67 points 1 week ago

Sex traffickers also use the platform to abuse and exploit them...

I hate bullshit clickbait like this article. These are horror stories about sex trafficking and slavery, not about OnlyFans. Crap like this is what killed Craigslist's adult personals. At the time, it had become a tool for sex workers to come out of the shadows and be free of pimps and slavers. All the closing of Craigslist's sex work section did was hurt sex workers. Articles like this aim to do the same to platforms like OnlyFans.

[-] Dagwood222@lemm.ee 28 points 1 week ago

As long as sex work is illegal, it will be easy for people to find ways to abuse sex workers.

[-] digdilem@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 week ago

Making sex work legal won't stop slavery - plenty of modern day slaves exists today in nail salons, fast food, cleaning, factory work and so on in every city in every Western country.

[-] gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 week ago

Making something illegal almost never outright stops it

It does make it significantly easier to regulate a market if it's legal than if it's not, so the EXTRA illegal shit goes down when markets are legalized

[-] digdilem@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 week ago

It can help, yes - but a large percentage of the 38 to 49 million modern day slaves still exist in otherwise fully legal businesses.

Awareness of slavery is still really low amongst many people. It's going on everywhere, not just in the sex business and is very difficult to stop.

[-] gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 6 days ago

It can help, yes - but a large percentage of the 38 to 49 million modern day slaves still exist in otherwise fully legal businesses.

Fun fact: the majority of people trafficked in the world are for sex purposes, so if you make it far easier to shut down that market, it damages all the other slave markets too

I get that you're trying to bring awareness or whatever but both comments so far read more like "not worth legalizing sex work when other slaves still exist"

[-] digdilem@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago

Fun fact: the majority of people trafficked in the world are for sex purposes

What's the source for this, please?

My own research points to the fairly reputable https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery/ which estimated around 28m in modern slavery (on the low side of other estimates), and of those, 6.3m are in commercial sexual exploitation, less than a quarter.

I get that you’re trying to bring awareness or whatever

I absolutely am trying to do that - it seems to be ignored by almost everyone, something that I personally find shocking. Even when raising the figures here - usually a place full of people with more empathy than most social media, the response has been partly negative. Maybe because people don't seem to want to acknowledge the bigger problem. I don't get it. Perhaps the numbers are so huge it's hard to appreciate that each one of these is a human being who's trapped, alone and suffering.

but both comments so far read more like “not worth legalizing sex work when other slaves still exist”

That wasn't the intention.

[-] Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

Way to add literally nothing to the conversation. This post wasn't an invitation to get on your sopbox.

[-] digdilem@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago

Thank you for your own deeply considered and valuable contribution.

[-] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Prison slaves in the woods fighting a California wildfire. MERICA!

[-] GiveMemes@jlai.lu -1 points 1 week ago

Literally lmao

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 26 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The difference is that, unlike craigslist, OnlyFans takes a massive 20% cut of all revenue. For comparison, Patreon takes a little more than 5%. Purely from a labor perspective, that's outrageous, so I do think that it's fair to demand that they at least do more to justify it, which ought to include protecting the people that actually do the work.

There's also what's to me the bigger problem: OnlyFans obviously didn't invent online sex work, but it did radically reshape it. They are responsible for mainstreaming this patreon-style, girl-next-door porn actress that people expect to interact with on a parasocial level. Those are features that OnlyFans purposefully put in to maximize their own profit, but they seem particularly ripe for the kind of nauseating small-scale abuse that the article discusses in depth. Suddenly, if an abusive partner wants to trap and control someone, there's a mainstream, streamlined path to making that profitable. Again, OnlyFans didn't create that, in the same way that Uber didn't create paying some random person with a car for a ride to the airport, but they did reshape it, systematize it, mainstream it, and profit handsomely off it. Craigslist was just a place to put classifieds, but OnlyFans is a platform that governs every detail of these relationships between creators and fans, down to the font of their DMs. If the way that they've built the platform makes this kind of abuse easier, that's a huge problem.

I agree with you that this article doesn't do a good job articulating any of this, though.

[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 week ago

Yes, they banned Craigslist ads in order to spawn something even more exploitative. Let's see what happens after they ban OF. (seriously though no.)

[-] admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 7 points 1 week ago

About that 20% cut - I'm not going to argue about what amount would be fair, but for that money they do handle all the payment, distribution and infrastructure. In that sense it's more comparable to Steam, Apple, Google etc.

But that's getting pretty off-topic.

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago

I agree that it's like Apple and Google (I don't know much about Steam) in that those are obvious price-gouging monopolists.

[-] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago

Video streaming is not cheap. Petabytes and petabytes of data transferred, stored, streaming, networked, etc., etc. YouTube is already barely profitable and only from pissing off their audience and streamers.

A comparison to Patreon isn't fair at all because they have almost no infrastructure to speak of. What do they actually do? Host a web site with some forum software on it? Handle subscriptions and emails, with a light bit of payment handling? Really?

[-] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

Oh no the corporations can't afford to host! Guess we will have to create the tools to self host our own shit then.

[-] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 days ago

Have you seen PeerTube? It's a good attempt, but even with the P2P-style sharing, they are experiencing 100x the problems that Lemmy has here because of the sheer amount of bandwidth and storage they have to deal with from a tiny micro-fraction of a percentage of the content that YouTube or OnlyFans serves.

Right now, large corporations are the only ones with the resources to even attempt such a thing, unfortunately.

[-] admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 2 points 6 days ago

Meanwhile, in the real world, creators just want to setup an account and sell their content. Not having to deal with payment processors, setting up cdns port handling customer support themselves.

There's enough to complain about how OnlyFans impacts society (like creating fake interactions with customers who think they're interacting with the real deal). But them wanting a cut for doing all the technical middleman stuff is actually reasonable.

[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago

Well there's no point in going after the worst criminals right?

We gotta ban Only Fans and TikTok and probably a whole bunch of other apps!!!! \s

[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 1 week ago

So the state is going to attack these sexual predators instead of just shutting down a website, right? Right?

[-] admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 7 points 1 week ago

No need for these kind of inflammatory comments, the article itself is bad enough.

If you read the article, you would have seen that, yes, the perpetrator is serving a 20 year sentence.

[-] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Sex work is real dignified work and it should be legal and regulated.

Not like those degenerate landlords. Get a job and contribute you fucking leeches!

[-] admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 9 points 1 week ago

Interesting title.

What could OnlyFans have done to prevent this?

this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
96 points (92.9% liked)

Technology

34994 readers
256 users here now

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.

Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.

Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
MinutePhrase@lemmy.ml