“The banks that connect merchants to our network will need to certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content,” Mastercard said. The move, Mastercard said, was aimed at combating illegal adult material.
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Then, in April, Mastercard rolled out a series of new requirements governing adult-content transactions.
Though Visa later agreed to restore service to some adult sites owned by Pornhub’s parent, MindGeek, Pornhub itself remains cut off from credit card processors the platform still only accepts payment by direct bank transfer and cryptocurrency.
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In response, Pornhub scrubbed its site of all videos that weren’t produced by verified partners and implemented a verification program that all users would need to undergo if they wanted to post adult content.
Last December, Discover, Mastercard and Visa all announced that they would suspend payments to Pornhub, one of the web’s largest porn sites, following allegations that the site had hosted child sexual abuse material. “I think we’re on the verge of a cultural shift in the finance industry that takes this issue far more seriously,” said Haley McNamara, VP of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, an advocacy group that last year began pressuring payment companies to act more aggressively on abusive sexual content.Ĭredit card companies are growing increasingly conscious of their own potential legal exposure, McNamara added, if they are accused of facilitating sex trafficking or the spread of child sexual abuse material. But the issue, they say, is not one of mere prudishness, but legal exposure. OnlyFans’ decision to attribute its policy change to payment companies reflects how the financial sector has increasingly leaned against sites that share adult content. In an interview with the Financial Times, Stokely said BNY Mellon had blocked payments from OnlyFans to its creators and accused banking giant JP Morgan of shutting down accounts of sex workers or “any business that supports sex workers.” BNY Mellon and JP Morgan declined to comment. (Other payment processors didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.)Īfter this story initially ran, OnlyFans CEO Tim Stokely blamed banks such as Bank of New York Mellon for the company’s decision. “It’s a decision they came to themselves,” Eisen said. Seth Eisen, a spokesman for Mastercard, told CNN Business it was not involved in OnlyFans’ decision to restrict the content it would allow on the platform. “These changes are to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers,” it added. In its announcement this week, OnlyFans said its decision was driven with a view toward building a sustainable platform for the long term. Now their future on the platform is uncertain The OnlyFans website on a laptop computer arranged in New York, U.S., on Thursday, June 17, 2021. OnlyFans’ decision is also a result of a much wider and concerted crackdown in recent years across explicit parts of the internet, one driven largely by a group of powerful and increasingly assertive companies: The payment processors who, behind the scenes, handle every swipe of your credit card whether you’re paying for gas, buying groceries or, yes, tipping a performer on OnlyFans. According to internal documents obtained by Axios, OnlyFans’ popularity and revenue both exploded during the pandemic, yet it has struggled to secure outside investment. Venture capital firms are often wary of investing in platforms that host adult content. Only “content containing sexually-explicit conduct” - presumably meaning sex acts on camera - will be banned, it said in a statement. Not all of OnlyFans’ explicit content is going away simple nudity will still be allowed, the company said, as long as it complies with the platform’s other policies. Many of these sex workers are now expressing outrage at what they view as OnlyFans’s betrayal of a community that enabled the platform’s massive success. For many, performing on the app is a lifeline: Some who lost their jobs during the pandemic turned to sharing explicit videos of themselves on OnlyFans to help pay the bills. OnlyFans, a website with 130 million users and more than 2 million content creators, has become synonymous with pornography.
Thursday’s decision by the creator platform OnlyFans to soon stop hosting a wide swath of sexually explicit content is sending shockwaves through the internet.
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