Fetish performer
“That literally wiped away seven years of my career,” she said. “It put me into a fucking spiral.”
Knox spent subsequent weeks trying to figure out what to do next. She knew she wasn’t going to leave porn — and doubted she could get a mainstream job given the mark she’d made online in the adult industry anyway — but she worried about paying her bills after her content had been stripped.
The current reality is bleak for online performers, but the ripple effects could be even worse for the future of online porn and internet freedom as a whole, porn industry insiders and free speech advocates said. Given mass video deletions, faulty facial recognition software being deployed for verification, and the fear of being doxxed, sex workers are sounding the alarm about the dangers of a sanitized internet.
How the new rules impact kinky porn
It’s possible that your favorite creator or platform may be removed from the internet due to these rules in the (very near) future. This is especially true if you’re into fetish content like bondage, pain, or group play.
If someone makes only solo “vanilla” videos, which can include everything from nude imagery to masturbating on camera, for instance, they don’t have to file the myriad paperwork for themselves and their scene partners, nor worry about a fetish search term getting flagged. But solo vanilla content could still be removed due to technical errors.
Knox said that iWantClips is slowly reposting incorrectly scrubbed videos, but only a small fraction — 120 out of thousands — are currently up. Because each video needs to be pre-approved, the process is slow, she explained. The porn platform didn’t respond to Mashable’s request for comment.
Sex workers are confused and fearful said LaLa B Holston-Zannell, the trans justice campaign manager for the ACLU. Many don’t fully understand the new rules or what to look out for. They may not know which keywords — such as “rape play” or other phrases that could be flagged for showing non-consenting acts even if the performers agree to play the role — could get their content and entire profile on certain sites deleted.
Then there are the patchwork of compliance rules. OnlyFans, for example, has its own release form every performer that appears in a scene must sign, said Knox, even though the performers already signed other forms at the time of shooting.
For Knox, this arduous process played out in a hair-pulling way recently. OnlyFans sent her an email asking to get another performer in a video to file their verification form. But that other performer was her ex-husband who hadn’t been in the industry for years. What’s worse, she only had 48 hours to get a hold of her ex and ask him to fill out the paperwork. She couldn’t get a hold of him, which frustrated Knox because she had the appropriate documentation when the videos were actually made.
As a result of this new form from OnlyFans, Knox pulled her videos from the site, which has become especially popular during the pandemic as folks seek new revenue streams following job losses and viewers are keen to watch. Knox called it “impossible” to keep her content up, and estimated she’s making 30 percent of what she made in 2020.
“Even spanking is considered an issue.”
Adult content creator and BDSM model
“Even spanking is considered an issue,” said Sterling. “If they find it…they’ll wipe your whole page.” Sterling said she knows performers who have woken up to their pages broken and money missing. OnlyFans didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Marginalized creators will be hit hardest
In addition to documentation, sites like
Sterling, who is Black, said she had to contact a camming site’s IT department when she signed up because her ID initially showed up as invalid. She dealt with that before the new Mastercard rules. However, the increased use of facial recognition is expected to negatively impact the most marginalized sex workers because of implicit biases in the AI, said Mike Stabile, a representative for Free Speech Coalition, a porn industry lobbying group.
Another snag is re-uploading now-expired IDs that were valid at the time of a shoot. This could impact any sex worker, but especially a trans one. Say a gender non-conforming performer changed their name after a porn shoot, but their old ID has their deadname. A platform will likely see the old ID as invalid.
Given that platforms need lots of personal information — like one’s legal name and address — there’s also a legitimate fear of leaks and doxxing, said Sterling.
A crash course in porn legislation
What porn consumers may not know is that creators have verified performers’ ages and consent for decades. Since 1988, U.S. lawmakers have
The U.S. government expanded these regulations as internet porn boomed in the early 2000s. Now, the law
If above-board porn productions have required verification since before the dawn of the internet, why are the Mastercard regulations happening now, and how are they different?
The lead up to Mastercard’s crackdown
Fast forward to the end of last year, when the
Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, had
Pornhub and MindGeek should’ve been taking down illegal content more proactively, said
While NCOSE has also called out social media platforms for hosting child porn, it’s been most successful at squeezing porn sites that don’t have the same resources as tech behemoths to monitor content and are dependent on payment processors. Facebook doesn’t make its money off taking a percentage of sales. It makes money from ads and the digital ad buys
Despite the outcry against OnlyFans, the
Deletion of online spaces
Adult content creator
“[The new rules] just make it very likely that most platforms could eventually just go out of business entirely,” she said, “because they can’t keep enough full-time staff to do round the clock moderation and be able to remove videos.”
Some have already experienced scares. Adult platform PocketStars had an overnight shutdown of their credit card processor earlier this year without warning according to Sterling, who uses the site. PocketStars hasn’t responded to Mashable’s request for comment, but
Because of all the logistical hoops adult creators need to jump through, some fear being pushed offline, said Holston-Zannell. “Folks who were street-based sex workers now found a way that’s more safe because they can do it online,” she said. “But now [they say], ‘no, I’m gonna have to go back to the street.'”
Knox, and Dahl both discussed the possibility of meeting clients in real life as well if they have to, making their jobs more precarious. “We’re just living day by day to see what’s next,” said Knox.
Sterling, meanwhile, said she’s expanding to SFW ventures like a
All the while, Dahl and Knox said their clients aren’t privy to how these rules are impacting their livelihoods, and could impact internet porn overall.
“Even in my own fan base…even those diehard fans who are paying attention, they still don’t understand what’s going on,” Dahl said.
Bitcoin won’t save porn
One way around the grip of payment processors is to accept cryptocurrency. While
“Someone can’t be horny and go buy my videos and jerk off in those three minutes,” she said. “There’s just a lot of hurdles.”
If you watch porn, it’s possible the content you enjoy and performers you support will vanish.
Yet another hurdle according to
Further, a new payment technology isn’t going to help the overall trend of platforms and payment processors desexualizing online spaces.
Canaries in a coalmine
If you watch porn, it’s possible the content you enjoy and performers you support will vanish. Even if you don’t, you’ll likely be affected, regardless.
“Sex workers are the canary in the coal mine of free speech online,” said Stabile, echoing similar comments from sex workers and other experts. “Everything that happens to them eventually trickles down to civilians.”
He used shadowbanning, when social media sites block someone’s content without removing them, as an example. Sex workers have
“Consumers might not notice that sex workers are gone but they will notice when their own rights and spaces start to shrink.”
“Consumers might not notice that sex workers are gone,” he continued, “but they will notice when their own rights and spaces start to shrink. We’re seeing it now with biometric facial recognition, age estimation, and ID verification.” Instagram, for example, recently asked some users to
What we’re also seeing is the desxualization of the internet as a whole, said MacDonald, the porn researcher. Take
Sex is part of the social fabric of life, said MacDonald. People will always want to discuss and portray it in spaces they inhabit. But monopolistic platforms are increasingly policing such content, and
Holston-Zannell urged consumers to question why these companies are controlling their purchases in the first place: “Why do you want Mastercard making those decisions?” she asked. “If they can regulate this, what else can they regulate?”
While she’s hopeful that conversations around these rules are starting thanks to sex workers, she and other experts worry about what could be down the pipeline — for everyone.
“In the past few weeks, we’ve seen politicians in