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OnlyFans.
Now, if you haven’t heard of it,
it's a website where users can get paid by subscribers for content.
OnlyFans is a kind of fusion between social media and webcam sites.
If you Google OnlyFans, you will see porn, porn, porn, porn.
I get, like, 50 to 100 messages a day
from people asking about how they can start their own OnlyFans,
they want tips and tricks.
OnlyFans has been facing growing scrutiny recently
over its ability to remove illegal and exploitative material.
We found one 17-year-old in the southeast of England
had made nearly five grand in a week from selling nudes.
Very popular one is ageplays.
They like it when the girl sort of like pretends to be younger.
There are children as young as 14 years of age
that are then seeing the opportunity to generate income.
[INVESTIGATORS]
I’m Noel Titheradge,
and I’m an investigative journalist at BBC News.
My name’s Rianna Croxford,
and I’m a correspondent in the investigations team at BBC News.
So Rianna and I had been working on a story together.
We decided to investigate OnlyFans
because it seemed like week after week,
we were seeing tons of stories on our feeds
about ordinary women— teachers, accountants, students—
who are making life-changing amounts of money from selling nudes.
Eight months ago, I started OnlyFans.
It’s just changed my life so much.
OnlyFans is a British-based social media site
that allows people to share photos and videos behind a paywall
and charge a subscription fee for access.
It hosts a range of content,
from music videos to fitness videos and even cookery videos.
But you probably know it because it’s best known for pornography.
OnlyFans is a global phenomenon.
It’s grown massively in the pandemic
to more than 130 million subscribers worldwide.
I felt like it was a world that really needed exploring.
One thing I will say to begin with,
it is really difficult to investigate OnlyFans.
Because the site is designed to have paywalls
around each individual creator’s content,
there are concerns about scrutiny of full content on the site.
And as a result, it’s harder to see what’s happening behind the scenes.
Some things that we’ve investigated have been concerns about
underage use of the platform.
So we found that children, under 18s,
were selling and appearing in explicit videos
in violation of OnlyFans’ policies,
as well as the law.
OnlyFans has age verification processes
where you have to sign up with ID to gain access to the account.
We showed that those age verification processes could be cheated.
We set up an account for a 17-year-old
using a 26-year-old’s ID.
The proof process, you take a picture of your ID up to your face
so they know that you are who you say you are.
Like, I literally did not look like my license,
and they approved me in the same day.
It’s honestly, really easy.
It’s just like managing an Instagram or something.
We spoke to schools, police forces, child protection experts
about cases that they were aware of.
One of the agencies that we spoke to is called NCMEC,
the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,
known as a kind of global clearinghouse
for reports of child sexual exploitation.
Now, they told us that in 2019
they’d had about a dozen cases of reports of missing children
being linked to OnlyFans videos.
But actually, in 2020, those cases tripled.
And they said some of these videos were, you know, trafficking,
child sexual exploitation, nudity, stripping,
but also lots of self-generated material of under 18s
basically creating child abuse material themselves.
We wanted to speak to people
who had first-hand knowledge of children using the site.
Now this is where it’s difficult—
users don’t use their real names,
and it’s illegal for children to post sexually explicit pictures online.
We found one 17-year-old in the southeast of England
had made nearly five grand in a week from selling nudes
and videos of her masturbating with sex toys.
We managed to trace the family home
from a selfie taken outside the front door.
So we matched the house’s fixtures, brickwork, design
to the correct housing address
using open-source intelligence and imaging software.
We were knocking on the door,
expecting it to get [click] slammed firmly in our face.
It was actually pouring with hail, but the mum took pity on us.
She wanted to tell us about
how her daughter had gained access to the site.
She said that her daughter had confessed
that she had used a fake driving license
to sign up to the account.
We also learnt that the girl’s pictures
had been widely leaked across the internet.
We learned that she’d been bullied at school,
that she’d previously had naked images of her shared around school
without her consent.
She’d had a really tough time,
and it was almost like selling explicit photos on her terms
was a way of gaining back that control she’d lost
when nudes had been shared of her without her consent
a couple of years before.
I’d learned of content on OnlyFans that clearly broke the site’s rules.
I then spent weeks trying to persuade staff
to tell me about their experiences working on OnlyFans.
I interviewed two of them.
They told me that they’d found prostitution services advertised,
bestiality, spy cam footage,
and material that one believed to be incest.
But I still wanted to know precisely what OnlyFans told its moderators
it should do when they come across illegal content.
I obtained internal OnlyFans documents
described as compliance documents from this year.
They revealed that although illegal content itself is removed,
OnlyFans lets moderators give multiple warnings
to accounts posting illegal content.
I found that rape threats, racial abuse, revenge porn,
and even ISIS terror videos
have been posted on OnlyFans in the past year
without being detected by its moderators.
I found cases on social media of people who had complaints,
including people who had been subject to revenge porn.
You know, somebody had received lots of rape and death threats.
This subscriber had been threatening to kill her and her children.
When she reported it to OnlyFans,
OnlyFans said the rude messages— they called them rude messages—
didn’t violate its guidelines,
and so they wouldn’t remove the subscriber’s account.
This creator then made more than 20 complaints to OnlyFans
in a six-month period.
Didn’t get a response till more than six months later.
As with any investigation and our right to apply process,
I put my findings to the company and asked for their response.
Minutes before we were due to publish,
stories were run that OnlyFans was making a dramatic announcement
banning pornography on its sites.
Last week, the website announced that it would no longer allow
sexually explicit content on its platform.
Now, that is like telling movie theaters
that they can no longer show films.
As that announcement was made,
my phone was blowing up from all the creators that I’d spoken to.
You know, they were confused, they were bewildered.
There was widespread incredulity at the time
that a site best known for hosting pornography
was now banning it.
Well, in an interview with the
the founder, Tim Stokely,
said that OnlyFans had been left with no choice
because banks were obstructing the 300 million pounds a month
that the site pays out to its creators.
But just six days later,
all the plans were torn up,
and OnlyFans announced it would continue to host
sexually explicit content on its site.
The story was mainly about safeguarding kids, protecting kids,
and raising awareness about the platform,
particularly how quickly it's grown.
And that was both for parents who may never have heard of OnlyFans,
but also, you know, it was quite important to me as well.
We wanted to make sure that our reporting humanized
the under-18s who had been selling these explicit videos.
This is especially important in areas where there's great change.
OnlyFans grew massively during the pandemic,
but this was set against successive delays in the UK
in introducing new online safety laws.
But our investigative reporting was able to provide
a genuine insight into underage use and moderation on OnlyFans
at a time when sites were effectively being asked to self-regulate.
[In response to the BBC investigations,]
[OnlyFans provided the following statements:]
[The leaked documents were not manuals of “official guidance.“]
[“We do not tolerate any violation of our terms of service,]
[and we take immediate action]
[to uphold the safety and security of our users.“]
[OnlyFans has a zero tolerance policy]
[relating to child sexual abuse material,]
[reports it to relevant authorities and supports their investigations.]
[It has a number of systems in place]
[to prevent children from accessing the site]
[and continues to look for new ways to enhance them]
[and works with online exploitation agencies like NCMEC]
[to raise any potential issues with the relevant authorities.]
[Only Fans said that any fan reported and found to have been abusive]
[is immediately removed from the platform.]