Millions of paywalls hinder scrutiny of OnlyFans

It is difficult to measure the extent of child sexual abuse images and videos on the porn-driven website OnlyFans, investigators and experts say.

The only publicly available statistics are provided by OnlyFans itself. Under federal law, US-based electronic service providers — including social media platforms and porn sites — must report any suspected child abuse to the National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), a nonprofit organisation designated by Congress to serve as a clearing house for such reports. As a UK-based company, OnlyFans is not legally obligated to file reports to the centre but says it does so voluntarily.

OnlyFans says it immediately removes any suspected child sexual abuse material it detects and makes a report to the centre’s CyberTipline. In 2023, the company made 347 such CyberTipline reports “out of hundreds of millions of posts”, an OnlyFans spokesperson says. “This is testament to the rigorous safety controls OnlyFans has in place.”

Much of this suspect material “does not turn out to be CSAM [child sexual abuse material] and/or are duplicate images or videos”, OnlyFans says on its website.

But five specialists in online child sexual abuse say the actual amount of CSAM on OnlyFans is difficult to verify independently due to the existence of individual paywalls for many of its 3.2-million creators.

“It’s not just one paywall. It’s a paywall for each and every contributor,” says Trey Amick, director of forensic consultants at Magnet Forensics, a Canada-based company that supplies law enforcement agencies with tools to search for child sexual abuse material.

The information police can typically get from an account, without paying for a subscription or enlisting OnlyFans’ help, is a website address, a non-explicit photo of the creator and some text describing the account.

“Beyond that, it’s extremely difficult to acquire content that’s hosted behind the paywalls of OnlyFans,” Amick says.

Once police sought OnlyFans’ help in a case, the company provided them all the information they needed, including account details, content and direct messages, the OnlyFans spokesperson said. “Police investigators do not need to subscribe to content,” she said.

The spokesperson also noted that National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children had “full access” to the site behind its paywalls.

The centre says that access began in late 2023 and is “limited” to OnlyFans accounts reported to its CyberTipline or connected to a missing child case. Beyond that, the centre “does not proactively monitor, moderate, or actively seek to review content at scale” behind OnlyFans’ paywalls, or on any other website.

In 2021, OnlyFans appointed an “independent third party” monitor, Michael Ward, “to provide even greater transparency into our industry-leading safety measures”, its website says.

Ward, a former US justice department prosecutor who now works at the law firm Baker Botts, was tasked with analysing and assessing OnlyFans’ safety controls, the website says. OnlyFans did not respond to questions about him.

Contacted by Reuters, Ward said he could not comment or confirm that he performed the role OnlyFans said he did.

Reuters