Discord spent months telling parents its platform was “safe by design” while Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton spent months proving that was just a marketing line. On Friday, the two sides landed on an agreed injunction that forces Discord to bring the same age-assurance and default safety settings it already uses in the United Kingdom over to its Texas users, and to do it within 90 days, with the state checking its homework every 30.

Discord currently lets anyone sign up with an email and a self-reported birthdate, no verification required, no friction whatsoever. Texas investigators tested that system by creating an account posing as a 13-year-old girl. A stranger messaged her almost instantly. Within 30 seconds, he was soliciting her for explicit sexual acts. Paxton sued in May under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, won a temporary restraining order that same month forcing Discord to stop defaulting kids’ accounts to the weakest safety settings, and has now converted that into a longer-lasting agreed injunction signed by a Collin County judge.

The fix, at least on paper, isn’t complicated. Messages from strangers get routed into a separate request inbox instead of landing straight in a kid’s DMs. Sensitive content gets blocked for teens by default, and stays blocked unless the platform can confirm the user is actually an adult. Adult-only spaces close entirely to anyone whose age hasn’t been verified. Discord already built all of this for UK users, responding to that country’s Online Safety Act. Texas just told them to stop treating American kids like a lower priority. Notably, the order doesn’t force Discord to start grabbing up new categories of personal data to pull this off, and the company isn’t admitting any wrongdoing by signing it. This is a settlement, not a verdict. The real trial is scheduled for 2027, and Texas isn’t Discord’s only headache: New Jersey sued 15 months ago, and Nevada, Indiana, and Arkansas have all taken their own swings.

Age-assurance mandates are the regulatory wave every adult platform has been bracing for, but now it’s coming for other platforms. And it looks like Discord just became the biggest test case yet for how that fight actually plays out in court instead of in a press release. States aren’t waiting for federal age-verification standards to materialize. They’re suing platform by platform, forcing company-specific settlements that then become the template everyone else gets measured against. If a general-purpose chat app with 200 million users can be compelled to verify ages and gate adult content within 90 days, the legal runway for going after platforms where adult content is the entire business model gets a lot shorter. OnlyFans, and the ecosystem of directories, forums, and messaging tools that surround it, should read this injunction less as unrelated news and more as a preview screening.

There’s a bigger current running under all of it, too. For years, “we can’t verify age without invasive data collection” was the industry’s all-purpose shield, but Discord’s UK rollout just proved the shield was mostly theater. The system existed. It worked somewhere. It just wasn’t turned on for American users until a state attorney general made turning it off more expensive than turning it on. 

Every platform that hosts strangers, minors, and adult content in the same building is watching this case for the same reason: the cost of “we’ll get to it eventually” just went up, and it went up in a Texas courtroom, not a Senate hearing room. So here’s the actual question worth sitting with: was the UK rollout ever about compliance with the right law, or just compliance with the loudest one?

Brianna Coppage did not plan for any of this. She was a high school English teacher in St. Clair, Missouri, working a job she loved while quietly running an OnlyFans account on the side to pay off the student loans that had been following her since graduation. The two lives coexisted, carefully separated, until October 2023, when a parent discovered the account and reported it to the school district. 

She was placed on administrative leave immediately, and within days, the story had gotten bigger than she could have imagined. She made national headlines and was forced to resign within weeks. The career she had built and the identity she had cultivated as an educator were gone, replaced by a level of public attention that she had not sought and could not control. 

But she didn’t retreat or apologize. She kept creating content, built her subscriber base thanks to all the publicity, and became one of the more recognizable faces in a conversation about what it means to work in adult content while living an otherwise conventional life. She spoke publicly about the financial math that drove her decision. After all, a teacher’s salary doesn’t go far these days, especially when the teacher has massive loan debt. OnlyFans was her way out of debt, but she never could have expected the consequences – or the opportunities that would come from them. 

Because now Brianna Coppage is going to be on television. 

TLC’s Double Lives of Suburban Wives premieres on August 9 at 10 pm, and the show follows six St. Louis area couples who have built adult content businesses alongside their suburban lives. Coppage and her husband Phillip are among them. The show describes them as the wealthiest couple in the group. What started as a way out of debt for Coppage has turned into, by the show’s account, an overnight success that made them the highest earners in the cast.

The trajectory from fired teacher to reality star is not as strange as it first appears. Coppage’s story had the elements that make for compelling television before TLC ever called: the secret double life, the dramatic exposure, the choice to lean in rather than retreat. In fact, she was the inspiration for a plotline in an episode of a South Park special.

The new TLC show offers a bit more nuance than the South Park episode, which isn’t something TLC is known for. But the structural choice to center the marriages and financial realities of the couples as opposed to the content itself shows that simply having an OnlyFans account isn’t as scandalous as it was just a few years ago when Coppage’s account was revealed. This show will be the chance for millions of people who have never thought about what the actual life of an adult creator looks like outside their content. 

Of course, the stigma question still exists in her life and in the new show. The trailer includes the fear of exposure, the weight of secrecy, and the relationship tensions that come with building a business most of your community doesn’t know about. Coppage and Phillip’s relationship is described as strained in parts. The show teases that he reveals they don’t have sex anymore, a detail that will drive significant viewer conversation regardless of what context surrounds it. 

A strained relationship isn’t the same as a life gone wrong like many stories involving OnlyFans models in pop culture. After all, Coppage is employed, financially stable, in control of her own professional decisions, and about to have her story told on national television on her own terms rather than through a school district’s press release. 

The career she lost was one she loved. It’s worth acknowledging that fact. And nothing about her subsequent success erases the fact that she was good at teaching and wanted to keep doing it. But what she built on the other side of it is incredible, and in August, millions of people will see what it looks like not as a warning, but as a life being lived by a real person.

Recently, The Daily Signal published two pieces that laid out the legal argument for reviving federal obscenity prosecution, arguing that adult content is already illegal under existing law and the only thing missing is the political will to enforce it. 

That missing piece may be President Trump’s latest nominee, Adam Candeub. He is nominated to lead the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, though he is currently general counsel at the FCC, a longtime Michigan State law professor, and a contributor to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Trump’s second term. He is also, based on his published record, one of the more serious architects for the argument that adult content should be criminalized under existing law rather than regulated through age verification and content moderation. 

The nomination has been covered primarily through the lens of Big Tech antitrust, as Candeub would inherit ongoing DOJ cases against Google and Apple. And he has a documented interest in challenging Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives platforms immunity from liability over user-generated content. But it’s his record on adult content that people should be paying attention to. 

Candeub has argued that adult material should be criminalized using existing obscenity statutes, the same laws the Daily Signal pieces cited, and the same framework that the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force used before it was disbanded under President Obama. His model involves state and local prosecutors bringing cases in conservative jurisdictions where community standards make convictions easier to obtain, combined with federal prosecution of major platforms under the modern interpretation of the Comstock Act (the 1973 law that bans sending obscene material across state lines). 

He praised the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling upholding the state age verification requirements for adult sites. That ruling, which accelerated the state-by-state age verification patchwork now covering more than half the country, was framed by Candeub as a signal that the courts are more receptive to content regulation than they have been in decades. He also suggested it creates more space to bring back older regulatory frameworks, and even floated the idea of tracking users’ online behavior as a tool for keeping minors away from adult content. This level of surveillance infrastructure raises significant constitutional questions and would require access to user data at a scale that doesn’t currently exist in any legal framework. 

Even if Candeub is confirmed, obscenity prosecutions wouldn’t begin immediately. The antitrust division he would be leading is competition enforcement, not content regulation. But the DOJ’s influence over hot platforms’ interpretation of legal exposure is substantial, and it doesn’t require a single successful prosecution to change platform behavior – just the threat of it. 

When major platforms like OnlyFans and other elements of the creator economy like payment processors and web hosts perceive that the legal environment around adult content is shifting toward prosecution rather than regulation, they respond before any case is filed. Policies are tightened, rules are changed, and app stores remove access. The legal threat functions as a pressure mechanism on the infrastructure long before it reaches a courtroom. Creators who have faced debanking understand that ambient legal risk is enough for businesses to remove the threat before they have to deal with it. 

That’s what Candeub’s framework is designed to do. He doesn’t even have to change anything legally. He just has to convince these platforms that legal pressure is building, and they’ll make the changes themselves. 

This is the slippery slope that people warned about when age verification laws began to pass around the United States. It’s not that creators didn’t want to protect children, which is how lawmakers justified these laws. It’s that they knew that once you start down this path, it’s hard to stop. 

The masked killer from the beloved Scary Movie franchise officially has an OnlyFans account. It’s free, it’s run by a Hollywood studio, and it was launched in a video directed by Carmen Electra. Why? To promote the digital release of Scary Movie 6, a film that grossed $228 million worldwide and sits at 23 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The account is teasing “spicy content” from Ghostface, which is a sentence that exists in the world now. 

It may seem like a joke, but it’s a real marketing strategy being used by a studio with a $30 million production budget. And it’s a strategy being used more and more often by organizations you’d least expect. 

Like the Canadian pottery guild using the subscription platform best known for porn to try to attract younger audiences to ceramics with their suggestive clay tutorials. The Hill Potters Guild, an organization that has spent decades promoting the craft, used the platform’s built-in cultural transgression as a hook, knowing people would click on their OnlyFans out of curiosity and stay for the content about the wellness benefits of working with your hands. Or by the scientists at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado, who launched an OnlyFans to fund their marmot research after federal funding cuts threatened a 60-year study. 

The list of brands, institutions, and promotional campaigns using OnlyFans as a vehicle for something other than adult content has been growing steadily for years, and Ghostface is its latest and maybe most absurd entry. 

But the real question is: why does this keep happening? It’s not complicated: OnlyFans has cultural weight now. It is recognizable, and since it reads a little transgressive, the decision to join generates press coverage. When a pottery guild launches an OnlyFans, people write about it because it’s unexpected. When a horror franchise does it, people write about it for the same reason. The name does the work. The name carries weight because adult creators gave it weight with their years of audience building, generating content, and making the platform so culturally unavoidable that people think Bonnie Blue was referenced in a Minions movie. 

Whether this shift benefits creators is worth asking, though, because the answer seems to run in both directions. 

It helps because every time a mainstream brand uses OnlyFans for something, the platform becomes less stigmatized. Ghostface’s free account sits on the same platform as adult creators’ paid content, and anyone who signs up to see what Ghostface is teasing is technically an OnlyFans user. The platform’s legitimacy expands, and cultural association broadens. The argument that OnlyFans is purely pornography (the argument that payment processor discrimination, banking restrictions, and social media suppression use) gets a little harder to sustain when a major Hollywood studio is using it for promotional stunts. 

And yet it doesn’t help, because bands are borrowing the platform’s cultural cachet without paying for it. They get the attention-grabbing association with something edgy without any of the risks that adult creators absorb daily. Ghostface’s account will get press coverage, generate some social media engagement, and disappear. The creators who made the platform famous will still be fighting for basic financial infrastructure. 

The pottery guild, the marmots, and now Ghostface. The platform built on the backs of adult creators has become the destination brands reach for when they want to look bold with minimal risks. It’s a strange tribute, but it could translate into something net positive for creators. 

Ofcom just released its Use of Age Assurance Report for 2026, and the picture it paints is instructive. The adult content industry followed the rules, while the major social media platforms largely have not. It’s the perfect example of how compliance burdens get distributed in practice, and adult content creators are the ones absorbing the cost on both sides. 

The headline numbers from the report are overall encouraging, at least. All of the UK’s top ten adult content sites now have age checks in place, and the majority of the top 100 do as well. The percentage of children who encountered highly effective age checks increased from 25 percent to 43 percent between July 2025 and January 2026, and Ofcom credits this as “significant progress” since the Online Safety Act’s rules for online porn operators took effect last July. The porn industry seems to be doing what it is told. 

Big Social is not. Meta, Google, and major platforms have internally developed machine learning systems they describe as “age inference” that supposedly monitor account activity and behavior to estimate whether a user might be a child. The UK’s privacy regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office, classifies these systems as “profiling,” not verification. And Ofcom is even more direct, stating point blank that inference “cannot be appropriate for the purposes of the ban or minimum age enforcement because it can only be used after the child has signed up and used the service for enough time for the inference to be made.”

In other words, the system only identifies a child as a child after they have already been on the platform. That’s not an age check; it’s a retroactive detection mechanism. Ofcom has now said explicitly that platforms using age inference to claim compliance should “switch to other methods listed in our guidance as highly effective without delay” or prove with reliable and compelling evidence that their current method actually works. 

TikTok is the first platform to face a formal investigation under the pressure, launched just last week. It won’t be the last. Ofcom currently has 23 open investigations covering 88 adult services. The social media investigations are escalating alongside those. 

For adult creators with UK audiences, the report describes a compliance landscape that is deeply asymmetric in its practical effects. Adult platforms that have implemented proper age verification like biometric checks, government ID matching, and third-party verification services have absorbed the real costs and real traffic losses during the process. The platforms followed the law and the creators took the hit. 

Meanwhile, the mainstream social media platforms where those same creators build audiences, promote content, and funnel potential subscribers have spent the same period deploying systems that regulators clearly say don’t work – systems that also punish these creators by shadowbanning and throttling reach. The compliance gap means adult content creators face stricter enforcement on all platforms, while social media platforms seem to get away with few repercussions. 

The next major date for anyone earning in the UK market is October when Ofcom delivers its assessment of what “highly effective age checks” for the over-16 social media restrictions should look like to Parliament. This report will inform parliamentary debate ahead of potential age restrictions that would come into play in 2027. The standards being set for adult platforms now could be the baseline of what’s required of social media platforms next. The real question is if they will comply. 

The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, is home to the world’s second-longest continuous study of individually marked mammals. It is a serious scientific institution conducting serious scientific work since 1962. And it has an OnlyFans account posting unfiltered marmot content. The grad student who runs the account would very much like you to know that it shouldn’t have come to this. 

“We should not have to make an OnlyFans account for our marmots in order to get funding,” said Emily Renkey, one of the researchers on the project. “But I think that’s where we’re at. We have to find creative ways to fund this project.”

The Marmoteers (that’s what they call themselves) arrived at the lab this spring to find a crisis. Colorado’s record-low snowpack had done exactly what it was supposed to prevent: the ground went uninsulated, and the hibernating marmots froze. More than 100 animals died over the winter, the second largest die-off in the study’s history. Of roughly 160 marmots the team had been following at the end of last year, only about 60 survived into spring. 

“It was a pretty brutal winter,” said grad student Katie Adler. “Mainly, we think it’s because the snowpack was so low that the insulation wasn’t there, so they all froze.”

Snow functions as a blanket for hibernating marmots, keeping the ground temperature stable. Without it, the animals have no buffer against the cold. Combined with a summer of drought and low water levels, which affect the plants marmots depend on for hydration, the team is watching a climate change story play out in real time, mammal by mammal. 

The research matters beyond the marmots themselves. “The water here is the same water we’re getting in L.A.,” Renkey said. “It’s impacting everyone.” The marmots function as an early-warning system for the broader effects of warming on shared water resources across the American West. It’s the kind of long-term ecological data that takes decades to accumulate and cannot be recreated once a study is interrupted. 

That’s what the Marmoteers are trying to avoid. The study is under intense financial pressure, and they responded with a level of creative desperation that is both admirable and slightly absurd. They brewed a beer with Crested Butte’s Irwin Brewing Company called Marmot Tears. They run a marmot-focused Instagram account. They launched Fat Marmot Week, a public contest inviting people to vote on which marmot bulked up most impressively ahead of hibernation. This year’s presumed front-runner is marmot Dawn, described by researchers as the “cover boy” of the contest, noted for his golden coat and harem of five female mates. 

And then there’s the OnlyFans. The account posts videos of marmot mothers with their babies and other behind-the-scenes footage that doesn’t make it into scientific literature. Unfiltered marmot content, in their own words. It is one of the more wholesome things currently on the platform, but it’s not alone. 

There’s a pattern beginning to emerge because the Marmoteers are not alone. 

Recently, the Hill Potters Guild in Canada launched their own OnlyFans channel for “Ceramics are Sexy,” a campaign built around suggestive pottery tutorials designed to attract a younger audience to a craft they associate with retirement homes. The tutorials are filmed in the visual language of adult content with strategically centered pieces and suggestive clay forms while actually teaching technique and communicating the wellness benefits of working with your hands. The goal is the same as the Marmoteers’. They both want to reach an audience that mainstream platforms aren’t delivering. 

And it just might work. OnlyFans offers something mainstream platforms don’t. There’s no worrying about an algorithm or shadowbanning. No concerns that a topic is too niche. You post, people subscribe, and they see it. For organizations whose content mainstream recommendation systems simply ignore, whether that’s hibernating rodents or Canadian ceramics,  that directness is valuable. 

We should not have to make an OnlyFans account for our marmots,” Renkey said again, and she’s right. The federal funding landscape for scientific research is the actual problem, and a marmot subscription service is not a substitute for stable institutional support. Dan Blumstein, the UCLA professor who leads the research, was direct about the stakes. “Nationally funded research has been around since World War II and has led to an incredible increase of knowledge globally,” he said. “But that’s what’s under threat right now. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Which is why the Marmoteers are on a platform with a reputation for unfiltered content, is increasingly hosting every other kind too, and just might save a sixty-year scientific record from disappearing into a warming Colorado winter.

The Senate passed the DEFIANCE Act by unanimous consent in January. Six months later, it is still sitting in the House Judiciary Committee, where it has not moved since being referred there in May 2025. 

The DEFIANCE Act, formally known as the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act, would give anyone depicted in nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes the right to file a civil lawsuit against the people who produced it, distributed it, solicited it, or possessed it with the intent to distribute it. Damages could reach $250,000, and the statute of limitations would run for ten years. It wouldn’t create liability for the platforms where deepfakes were shared, just the individuals who make and distribute them, leaving Section 230 protections intact. 

Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who co-wrote the bill with Republican Representative Laurel Lee of Florida, pointed to the House Judiciary Committee as the bottleneck. The bill cleared one of the most polarized legislative bodies in modern American history without a single dissenting vote in the Senate, but it can’t even get a floor vote in the House. 

What makes this bill so unique is the truly bipartisan support behind it. Ocasio-Cortez and Lee don’t agree on much, and neither do Democrat Dick Durban and Republican Lindsey Graham, who spearheaded the bill in the Senate. Graham, who suddenly passed away last week, made the passage of this legislation one of his priorities in his last months. Even celebrities are supportive of this bill, including Paris Hilton. She spoke at the January press conference calling for the House to act. She framed her support in terms of her own experience, having had a private video shared without her consent when she was only nineteen years old. She described it not as a scandal but as abuse, occurring at a time when no laws existed to protect her.

Seventeen-year-old Francesca Mani, a New Jersey high school student who became a confirmed victim of AI-generated deepfakes at only 14, also spoke at the January event. When this happened to her in 2023, her school told her no applicable laws existed, and no accountability was possible. She responded by saying she would bring them into law, and the teen has been a fierce advocate for the cause. While all fifty states have some sort of deepfake law now, the federal civil rights to sue would give victims even more power. 

And Mani is not alone. AOC noted at the January press conference that 90 percent of all deepfake images generated by AI have been nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes, and that 90 percent of those targeted women. One in eight teenagers in the United States knows a friend who has been targeted. And these platforms know it’s happening. That’s why xAI recently brought a lawsuit against a Grok user who generated CSAM. In the process of that suit, it was revealed that the company made more than 73,000 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2026. This is the scale of the problem the DEFIANCE Act is designed to address, at least partially. 

For adult creators, the current legal landscape means that when someone takes your photos and converts them into fake explicit content, your options are limited. DMCA takedowns address distribution on platforms that cooperate but don’t touch the creators. While some state laws provide criminal penalties, the right to sue the creator of these deepfakes isn’t as common. The DEFIANCE Acgt would fix that. 

Every month the bill sits in the House Judiciary Committee is another month that content creators, public figures, and ordinary citizens absorb the cost of the problem that the US Senate unanimously agreed to address. The House Judiciary Committee has the authority to schedule a markup and move the bill forward, but they won’t do it. 

Maybe it’s time to ask your representative why.

TLC has been in the business of reframing what the American family looks like for decades. Sister Wives. My 600-lb Life. 90 Day Fiance. The network has a specific talent for taking something the rest of television treats as a punchline or scandal and turning it into a Tuesday night ritual for millions of viewers.

Double Lives of Suburban Wives follows six couples in the St. Louis area who have built adult content businesses alongside their suburban lives. It’s a reality show featuring carpools, cul-de-sacs, and a significant OnlyFans income running quietly behind all of it. It premieres August 9 at 10 pm on TLC, and the trailer that dropped this week is worth watching carefully. 

Because when you do, you’ll notice that the couples seem to be the focus of the show. Not the content the women create. 

The cast of characters includes Tammy, who left her career as a registered veterinary nurse to create content full-time. She serves as the group’s anchor (think the Taylor Frankie Paul of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives), and she’s also navigating what it means to hold her faith and her work in the same life. 

Macy, a former nanny, says she and her day-trader husband Jim can “walk away with four or five grand” from a single video of her showering. Briana, who was outed as a creator and forced to leave her teaching job, is the wealthiest of the group. Though the trailer suggests the cost of that wealth shows up in their marriage in other ways. 

Heather and Shawn have been quietly building their business since 2019 without telling anyone in their lives, including the mother-in-law who lives with them. Megan is another teacher who had to leave the school after it was revealed that she created adult content to pay off her student loans, and Emily built a successful niche platform and insists the whole operation is strictly business. 

These women aren’t cautionary tales or redemption arcs like some pop culture depictions of content creators. They are business success stories with marriage dynamics layered in. That’s exactly what TLC does well. They take the structure of family drama and drop it into a context most networks won’t touch. 

It isn’t significant that TLC made a show about these women. But it is surprising that they structured it around the families, not the businesses. The husbands are just as important. The financial pressures are the inciting drama, but the friendships between the women and the men are the emotional spine. Adult content is the job that pays for everything else. That’s a meaningful narrative choice that the prestige dramas depicting OnlyFans works failed to do. It shows the work as work, and people doing it as people living regular lives. 

It’s a simple but profound way to begin to remove the stigma around OnlyFans work. Of course, the stigma and judgment still exist. It’s even in the trailer, with some characters fearing exposure, others navigating strained relationships, or how their faith fits in their work. But the judgment exists alongside evidence of agency, financial stability, and genuine community between the women, which is a more complete picture than most mainstream coverage has been willing to offer. 

The more the public sees the business behind the brand, the more room opens up to talk about what this work actually involves without flinching. Double Lives of Suburban Wives is a TLC reality show, not a policy document. But it’s reaching an audience that prestige HBO dramas and creator economy trade publications are not, and it’s telling them something true. This is how some families make a living; the marriages are complicated, the money is real, and the people are ordinary.

Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe signed an age verification bill into law this month, making the state the latest in a growing list that now requires adult sites to check every visitor’s ID before granting access. The law takes effect August 28, 2026. 

The law covers any commercial website or social platform where more than one-third of the content qualifies as sexual material harmful ot minors. Those sites must use a third-party service to verify that users are 18 or older, with verification methods that require government-issued ID, digital identification, or other personal records. The third parties conducting verification are prohibited from retaining identifying information after the check is complete. While that privacy protection may sound reassuring, it depends on enforcement. Overall, penalties are high at $10,000 per day for running a noncompliant site, $10,000 per instance of improperly retained data, and up to $250,000 if a minor is found to have accessed material in violation of these requirements. And Attorney General Catherine Hanaway has promised rigorous enforcement. 

Missouri isn’t doing anything new. It’s what dozens of states have done over recent years, and they’re following the template that has been spreading since Louisiana passed the first version in 2022. The legal foundation was solidified earlier this year when the Supreme Court upheld Texas’ age verification law, removing the primary constitutional obstacle that had kept other states cautious. Since that ruling, the legislative pipeline has accelerated. Iowa’s law took effect July 1. Missouri’s follows on August 28, and it won’t be the last. 

For creators, the pattern is the problem. Each new state law creates a local compliance question that plays out the same way. The major platforms make a choice about whether to implement verification or simply geo-block the state, and the choice directly affects creators’ reach and income in that market. Pornhub’s response to similar laws has been to block access entirely rather than build verification infrastructure, which may be cleaner for the platform but catastrophic for any creator whose audience exists in that state. OnlyFans, which already has age verification requirements in place, is in a different position, but the question of how any given platform responds to state-specific mandates is one creators have limited control over. 

The practical effect on traffic is real and documented. Age verification introduces friction, and friction means lost subscribers. Many users, especially casual browsers who haven’t committed to a creator, will encounter an ID requirement and simply close the tab. The people who stay are motivated, which sounds positive. But the new laws will cause creators to lose the top-of-the-funnel discovery that casual traffic provides. For creators who depend on free preview content to convert new subscribers, verification walls that appear before anyone sees anything are a meaningful structural problem. 

But creators aren’t the only ones who should be concerned. Users should be concerned about their privacy, because every age verification system creates records, however minimal or encrypted, and records are targets. Users who are unwilling to submit government identification to access adult content will either stop accessing that content through legal platforms or find workarounds. And workarounds are easy to come by, because VPNs are widely available and easy to use. Offshore platforms have no reason to comply with Missouri law to be accessible. The version of the internet that age verification is designed to regulat is the legal, compliant version. The unregulated version doesn’t notice. 

This is the criticism the Electronic Frontier Foundation raised when the Missouri law was announced. Aaron Mackey, EFF’s Free Speech and Transparency Litigation Director, called it “an onerous age-verification mandate that blocks adults from accessing lawful speech, curtails their ability to be anonymous online, and jeopardizes their data security and privacy.” The infrastructure being built to keep minors away from legal adult content is also infrastructure for restricting adults’ access to legal speech, and the Supreme Court ruling that greenlit it has opened a door that will not close easily. 

None of that changes what creators need to do practically. They should watch how the platforms they use respond in the days leading up to the change. If a platform geo-blocks the state rather than complying, that traffic will disappear. It if implements verificatino, expect some drop in casual reach as the friction takes effect. Neither outcome is good, and neither is something individual creators can prevent. And if you’re a subscriber or platform user in Missouri, be prepared to show your ID or download a VPN to continue to access your favorite creator’s content. 

The map is filling in, and it’s only a matter of time before the next state makes its announcement.

A federal judge ruled that Visa cannot walk away from one of the most significant lawsuits ever filed against an adult platform, and the implications for how payment processors treat adult content could be impacted forever. 

U.S. District Judge Wesley Hsu of the Central District of California denied Visa’s motion to be dismissed from the case against MindGeek, the former parent company of Pornhub. The lawsuit, brought by Serena Fleites and plaintiffs in 14 related cases, centers on CSAM and nonconsensual content that was uploaded to Pornhub without the victims’ knowledge or consent. Fleites was 13 years old when a video of her was posted to the site. It accumulated 400,000 views before she discovered it. MindGeek posted it across its other properties and ran advertising against it. 

The claims against MindGeek are not complicated. It isn’t a question of morality; it’s a question of illegality. Their actions caused serious harm to real people, and the companies that enabled it should face consequences. That part of the accountability is definitely valid. 

But the Visa element is more complicated, and it’s what could potentially impact creators. Earlier versions of the lawsuit had Visa characterized as a remote intermediary, simply a payment processor that processes the transactions without being meaningfully involved in what happens on the platform. The judge had previously agreed that it wasn’t enough to establish conspiracy liability. What changed in the last complaint is a new allegation: that Visa had an actual agreement with MindGeek to help minimize the visibility of the illegal conduct on its sites. The plaintiffs also allege that Visa and its member banks sometimes suggested changes to words and descriptions connected to illegal content and removed payment restrictions that had clear signs of trafficking. 

That allegation is what the judge found sufficient to keep the conspiracy claim alive. “Visa singled out a particular merchant and provided business advice to that merchant on how it might avoid regulatory scrutiny,” Judge Hsu wrote. That’s a meaningfully different legal posture than being a payment processor who didn’t look too closely. 

In a separate ruling, the judge dismissed claims against a group of hedge fund lenders who financed MindGeek, the Redwood defendants, finding that the plaintiffs hadn’t established a direct enough connection between these lenders and the specific illegal conduct in question, though the plaintiffs vowed to appeal that decision. 

But how will this impact the creator economy? 

First, let’s be very clear that the accountability for what happened on Pornhub is appropriate and necessary. CSAM is illegal and morally reprehensible, and nonconsensual content causes documented, serious harm. If Visa were truly advising MindGeek on how to minimize the visibility of that conduct rather than reporting it or exiting the relationship, that is exactly the kind of behavior that should face legal consequences. Payment networks are not neutral infrastructure if they are actively participating in the management of illegal activity. 

However, payment processors have spent years using the risk profile of adult content as justification for treating every creator in the space as a liability, regardless if their content is legal, consensual, age-verified, and fully compliant with all platform rules and local laws. Debanking, account holds, sudden closures, processing fees that don’t apply to other industries, and the constant threat of being dropped without notice at all are just part of the deal for adult content creators these days. And this ruling that keeps Visa on the hook for what happens on a platform it serves could give every processor one more reason to decide adult content simply is not worth the exposure – even if that ruling is fully valid. 

The creators who would feel this most acutely are not the large accounts with lawyers on retainer. It’s the smaller, independent creators on platforms like OnlyFans that will be at the mercy of the legal calculus processors like Visa will be doing this year. Because for them, the risk of providing service to a large company like MindGeek and a small verified adult creator in Ohio is the same. 

This case will move slowly, but it’s important to point out that the conspiracy claim against Visa is not a verdict. It’s just permission to keep litigating. But every development in this case could affect creators and their ability to process transactions. It won’t just be payment processors keeping an eye on this case. Banks are watching too, and creators need to be ready, because the side effects will likely land on people who had nothing to do with this case.

The Daily Signal (founded by the Heritage Foundation) published two pieces this week that, read together, outline something worth taking seriously: a legal and historical argument for using the obscenity law to go after adult content platforms. This isn’t new legislation or regulatory proposals still working their way through a committee. These pieces argue that existing law, existing courts, and a federal enforcement mechanism dormant since 2011 but never dismantled are enough to end porn as we know it. 

The first piece argued that general obscenity is already illegal under federal and state statutes, and has been since 1948. The real barrier to enforcement, the author argues, isn’t legal. It’s political will. The piece calls for reviving the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, a unit created under President George W. Bush in 2005 that secured convictions in every case it brought to conclusion before being quietly disbanded by the Obama administration in 2011. The proposed revival comes with a specific targeting strategy to go after high-value distributors and platforms, not just individual producers. 

The second piece, published the following day, supplied the historical scaffolding. The argument is that the founding fathers accepted broad government powers to regulate obscenity, and the internet era’s hands-off approach represents an aberration from American legal tradition rather than an expression of it. Read past the constitutional history and the practical implications is straightforward: the authors believe that the courts have been wrong, and with the increase of states like Iowa passing age verification laws and the potential for a federal age verification law, evidence is shifting their way. 

The Supreme Court ruling is doing a lot of work in conservative legal circles right now, and these op-eds point to it explicitly as a sign that courts may be warming to more content regulation. Age verification is the first domino. Obscenity enforcement, in this argument, is the next logical step. 

So how would that impact creators? 

Well, obscenity law in the United States operates under the Miller test, a three-part standard established by the Supreme Court in 1973. Material is legally obscene if it appeals to prurient interest, depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. All of those elements are evaluated against “community standards,” which vary wildly based on where your community is. What a jury in rural Alabama may consider patently offensive is likely very different than what a jury in New York City would consider patently offensive. The vagueness isn’t an accident. It’s the point, and it’s why reviving obscenity enforcement is so dangerous.  

A federal task force targeting platforms doesn’t need to win a single obscenity conviction to cause serious damage to the creator economy. It simply needs to make platforms nervous. And when platforms get nervous, they do what they always do. They restrict, demonetize, quietly change terms of service, and drop the creators most likely to attract scrutiny as a way to avoid any legal proceedings. 

This is the pattern that plays out every time legal or regulatory pressure is applied to adult content infrastructure. Payment processors get uncomfortable and threaten to pull out. Platforms change their policies overnight. Creators lose access and income while legal arguments play out in op-eds. Because infrastructure doesn’t wait for conviction, it responds to threat. 

And make no mistake, that’s exactly what these Daily Signal pieces are. They are explicitly calling for the revival of task forces, targeting these platforms, and using the recent Supreme Court ruling as cover. None of this is imminent, but the argument is being assembled in public, with legal citations and historical precedents that supporters will use to try to get their way. And if they do, creators have every reason to worry.