OnlyFans and Explicit Content

This week Fred and Matt take a look at a somewhat unusual topic but one that yields a very interesting conversation: the brief attempt to ban sexually explicit content from the platform OnlyFans. In late August OnlyFans announced that they would be banning sexually explicit content from the platform because of challenges they were facing securing relationships with financial institutions. This is worth talking about because it reveals the importance of payment processing platforming in conducting business online, and because it acts as an attack upon the digital disruption of the adult content industry. A large industry notoriously rife with exploitation, OnlyFans served as a place where creators could take control of the content they put out into the world. The difficulty of maintaining explicit content on OnlyFans, then, has important ethical dimensions to consider.