Turns out scammers are using that leaked content to hack government websites, and OnlyFans creators might be part of the solution. 

Here is a sentence you may not have expected to read today: OnlyFans creators are accidentally helping cybersecurity teams identify compromised government websites. Not intentionally, but as a byproduct of fighting the endless, exhausting battle against people stealing and redistributing their content without permission. 

The mechanics of how this happened are genuinely bizarre, nd they say something interesting about both the scale of the adult creator economy and the perpetual chaos of the internet. 

Start with the piracy problem, which predates OnlyFans and will likely outlast it. Adult content creator Laura Lux has been publishing content online for nearly two decades, on her own subscription site, a Patreon channel, and now OnlyFans. And for those two decades, people have been stealing it. “We do lose a lot of money just because the content is literally a Google search away a lot of the time,” she said. The solution most serious creators have adopted is aggressive use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This allows creators to file takedown requests, get stolen content removed from search results, and repeat the process over and over and over. “If you are not running a DMCA service, then you might as well probably not even be bothering doing the job, because it will be everywhere,” Lux said.

So creators and the companies that represent them send millions of DMCA takedown requests targeting every URL where their stolen content appears. 

Meanwhile, the scammers have been exploiting a specific vulnerability in how Google’s search algorithm works. Government and university websites (anything with .gov or .edu domains) rank highly in search results because those extensions carry institutional authority. If you can inject malicious content into a compromised government website, that content will show up near the top of search results for whatever keyword you’ve targeted. The scammers’ targets of choice have increasingly been the names of popular adult content creators, because people searching for “leaked” content are, as one cybersecurity expert put it, “primed to click recklessly”. Click the promising leaked OnlyFans video from a .gov domain and you end up on a page full of malware, online dating scams, and suspicious advertising schemes, all pumping money into the pockets of these fraudsters. 

The result, according to new research from a cybersecurity company UpGuard, is htat more than 2,000 domains belonging to governments and educational institutions across more than 80 countries have received copyright takedown requests linked to adult content creators over the past fifteen years. There have been 384,286 total takedown requests covering more than 631,000 URLS, and of those, Google has removed around 130,000. That means that the other 400,000 are still up and running. 

OnlyFans creators filing DMCA requests to protect their stolen content are inadvertently flagging compromised government infrastructure to Google, essentially doing the work of cybersecurity teams who may not know their websites have been hijacked. “The OnlyFans models are not setting out to help government websites,” said Greg Pollock, director of research at UpGuard, “but in order for them to police their copyright ownership, they wind up sending a lot of notices to Google about those sites.”

Yet the DMCA is simultaneously the best tool OnlyFans creators have to combat this kind of leaked content, while also being the tool that is being weaponized against them. Top OnlyFans creators have discovered that unverified filers are impersonating them to file fraudulent DMCA claims, some even using the creators’ own names to file takedowns against publishers who legitimately feature them. “My agent brought these fake reports to my attention — I didn’t even know this could happen,” said Kayla, a top 1% OnlyFans creator. “Other creators who don’t have agency representation lose traffic to their pages and have no idea why it’s happening or what to do.” Google processes takedown notices from unverified filers at scale, requires no identity verification, and has built no meaningful system to flag abuse because at the end of the day, it doesn’t really impact them. But the creators? They feel the consequences in both directions: their content gets stolen, and then the system designed to protect them gets turned into a weapon against them.  

Dan Purcell, CEO of creator content protection firm Ceartas, points out that sending DMCA requests to compromised government websites is legally questionable, as those sites aren’t intentionally hosting or advertising the content, so it’s likely not a genuine copyright violation in any meaningful sense. His company contacts the website’s security team directly when it encounters these situations instead of filing takedown requests. “Just because it smells funny and looks funny doesn’t mean that you just execute the most aggressive law possible to remove the content,” he said.

Yet for most creators, the DMCA is the only tool available to fight the very real piracy problem they deal with daily. For now, these OnlyFans creators will continue to file millions of takedown requests to protect their work, accidentally doing more for government cybersecurity than they’d ever imagine. If only the system would do something for them in return.

No, but the fact that people are asking the question says a lot about the creator economy. 

Thousands of parents sitting in darkened theaters convinced themselves that a yellow gibberish-speaking cartoon character shouted out a notorious British OnlyFans creator’s name during a World Cup-themed promotional clip. It didn’t actually happen, but the fact that so many people had the same question is astounding. 

It’s also something that wouldn’t have happened five years ago. 

The clip in question comes from Minions and Monsters, the latest film in the Minions franchise, which has been pumping out movies since 2010. The World Cup tie-in promo shows the little yellow creatures facing off against movie monsters in a football match. At one point, a Minion seems to be shouting names like Dua Lipa and Sabrina Carpenter. That’s when viewers think another Minion responds by shouting “Bonnie Blue.” 

The internet did what it always does, and the clip went viral. Some parents panicked, while others found it hilarious. TikTok weighed in with great enthusiasm. The discourse was, briefly, unhinged in the most delightful way possible. 

Meanwhile, the film’s director was baffled. Pierre Coffin went back to the recordings to investigate. “Apparently, I’m saying this other person’s name,” he said in an interview with The Movie Dweeb. “I’m bringing it up because I said, ‘Am I saying that?’ So I went back to them because I didn’t know that person.”

Turns out he was right. What audiences heard was actually part of the surname of one of the film’s animators, Omid Rajabalipour. The “balipour” portion apparently sounds, to ears primed by social media, like “Bonnie Blue.” “People hear that other person’s name, which is very strange,” Coffin said. Just like that, the mystery was solved. The internet had, once again, heard what it wanted to, not what was actually said. 

But here’s the fascinating part: the fact that thousands of people heard it at all is the real story here. 

Bonnie Blue is a UK-based adult content creator known for increasingly boundary-pushing content. She was banned from OnlyFans last year after some eyebrow-raising stunts, and she hasn’t stopped based on her recent golden baby shower stunt. The escalating stunts have made her simultaneously one of the most talked-about and most controversial figures in the adult creator economy. She is not, by any traditional media metric, a mainstream celebrity. She hasn’t been on a talk show, she doesn’t have a record deal, and she isn’t starring in the latest HBO series. 

And yet enough people recognized her name on instinct that in a split second of Minion gibberish, it went viral on multiple platforms and forced the film’s director to issue a formal clarification. 

That’s how culturally embedded Bonnie Blue and OnlyFans have become in today’s society. Five years ago, this wouldn’t have happened. But now, the creator economy has reached cultural saturation where an adult content creator’s name would be part of the ambient noise that people pattern-match to automatically. Five years ago, you would have needed to be actively following adult content to know names in that space. Today, you could be taking your kids to a Minions movie and have enough cultural context to think you heard one. 

This is what mainstream looks like when it sneaks up on you. It’s not a cover sotry or award show moment. It’s when a name becomes part of the background noise of culture, the stuff that people recognize without quite knowing how or when they learned it. Bonnie Blue is there, along with OnlyFans, which seems to be everywhere – in major television shows, at Paris Fashion Week, and even in Olympic training facilities. The platform has become a punchline, a political lightning rod, and a genuine economic force all at once. 

The creator economy has been arguing for years that it deserves to be taken seriously. The arguments have been good ones, and the data backed them up. But the data didn’t quite capture the moment as accurately as the Minions/Bonnie Blue mixup has. Because it is clear that the creator economy is simply part of the cultural furniture now. It’s present enough that people can find it in places it isn’t. 

Cultural relevance isn’t just measured by headlines. Sometimes it’s measured by what people think they hear in gibberish.

On a street in Montreal, a city in a country with stricter gun control than most of the world, a man opened fire near the headquarters of one of the most visited websites on the internet. The attack left three people dead, and the shooter left behind a 100+ page manifesto blaming capitalism, porn, and, of course, women for his loneliness and unhappiness. He identified with the incel movement, and he decided that his suffering was someone else’s fault. So he responded with violence. 

OnlyFans creator Kit Barrus read the news and felt something she’s been feeling more frequently: not surprise, but a grim recognition. 

“He basically went on a shooting spree and then claimed it was the fault of capitalism and porn,” Barrus said, “that they made him unhappy, lonely, targeted him, and made his life worse.” 

Barrus has been watching the radicalization pipeline that runs from loneliness to resentment to manosphere ideology to violence for years. She’s seen it in her comment sections, in her DMs, and in the way certain corners of the internet have built entire communities around the idea that women are responsible for male suffering. And more specifically, women like here: sexually visible and professionally unavailable. The incel movement is the most visible expression of that ideology, but it sits inside a broader ecosystem that includes pickup artist culture, men’s rights activism, and the general online infrastructure of what gets called the manosphere. Basically, it’s all a loose network of communities united by the conviction that feminism has broken something that men are owed. 

What Barrus wants people to understand is the specific paradox at the center of this violence. “I’ve seen men prioritize and put other men on a pedestal while trivializing women,” she said, “and then become upset when women don’t want any sort of sexual intimacy with them.” The men most drawn to incel ideology are frequently also the men most obsessed with women like Barrus, not as people, but as symbols of an availability they feel denied. “When men think, ‘There are no women who want to have a sexual relationship with me,’ and then scroll on Instagram and see OnlyFans models, we wind up becoming the target of their madness.”

It’s a catch-22 with a body count. The same women these men fetishize become the objects of their rage when the fantasy of access doesn’t materialize into reality. “These men often don’t want a normal, everyday woman,” Barrus said. “They want an OnlyFans creator who is overly sexually available to satisfy their needs, because they lack a way to view women as human. They want our sexual availability, but they don’t want to know us intimately.”

This is the core of what incel ideology gets catastrophically wrong about human connection. Intimacy is not a product. It cannot be purchased, demanded, or taken. It is built slowly, mutually, through the kind of vulnerability and reciprocity that requires seeing another person as fully human. “Intimacy is about connection,” Barrus said, “and if you’re unwilling to connect with women, you won’t be able to have intimacy with them. Nobody is owed sex or a relationship. It is something you continuously try to earn every day.”

The Montreal shooting is particularly striking because Canada has much stricter gun laws than the United States, along with lower rates of gun violence and a cultural identity built in deliberate contrast to American gun politics. That a man animated by incel ideology carried out a mass shooting there, near the offices of a porn company, with a manifesto explicitly blaming the adult entertainment industry signals something important about the reach of this radicalization. It isn’t just an American problem exported. It’s a global ideological infrastructure with local casualties. 

“It’s stunning that something like this has happened in Canada,” Barrus said. “I think it’s very telling that this ideology is reaching so far.”

The women most likely to be targeted by this ideology are the same women facing full-scale structural hostility. They’re already facing legislative pressure at the state level in the US, UK regulatory overreach, payment processor threats, shadowbanning on social media, and the quiet cultural consensus that their work is either a joke or a menace. Now they have to add the danger of being visible to men who have been conditioned to believe that female sexual autonomy is the source of their pain. 

“I think we’ve been seeing more and more of this violence over the last 10 years or so,” Barrus said, “and unfortunately, I think it will continue.”

At the end of the day, nobody is owed sex or a relationship. And no woman – not an OnlyFans creator, not a PornHub employee, not anyone whose proximity to the adult industry made her a symbol to a man with a manifesto – deserves to be the target for someone else’s failure to deal with their own loneliness. 

Three people in Montreal are dead because one man didn’t understand that. And unless something changes, this tragic event will likely happen again. 

OnlyFans is everywhere right now. Both HBO (Euphoria) and AppleTV (Margo’s Got Money Troubles) aired shows with OnlyFans as a major plot point this year. The platform has gained enough cache in the fashion industry thanks to its vertical that a French menswear designer can debut a capsule collection through it at Paris Fashion Week and have it make complete sense. The creator economy is bigger than ever, and OnlyFans is its most recognizable address. 

But here’s what the think pieces and prestige drama storylines tend to skip: none of this came from nowhere. The infrastructure, the stigma, the business models, and the fight for the right to exist stretch back decades before the first OnlyFans account was created. And right now, two very different cultural artifacts are making that case simultaneously: an HBO documentary about a woman in a crochet bikini who built an empire on public access television and a novel set in the San Fernando Valley at the exact moment the modern pornography industry was being born. 

Allie Rowbottom’s second novel, Lovers XXX, follows two young women, A teenage runaway turned exotic dancer and a juvenile delinquent turned aspiring artist, as their lives spiral in the burgeoning porn industry of the 1970s. More specifically, the story takes place in the San Fernando Valley, which quickly became the capital of American adult entertainment. It’s where the business of filmed sex was professionalized, industrialized, and ultimately, digitized into everything that followed. Rowbottom sets her novel at the moment of one technological shift (film to VHS) and ends it just before the pivot to OnlyFans and creator-led content. That decision was intentional: “That moment needs its own treatment,” she said in a recent interview. 

What Rowbottom is doing in Lovers XXX is the same thing the best cultural criticism does: tracing the line between then and now without pretending the line is straight or simple. Her characters are aspiring artists who end up in porn not because of moral failure but because of structural forces like limited options and access to systems that determine whose labor is valued and whose is consumed. “With each technological shift, each new outlet for selling sex and women’s bodies, a new crop of people got rich, most of them men,” one character observes in the novel. While there has been progress since then, especially given that the CEO of OnlyFans is a woman (Keily Blair), it may not be enough, as adult content creators are still fighting to remain uncensored and fairly compensated. 

While the Valley featured in the novel may have given the adult industry its first real infrastructure, Robin Byrd gave it a human face and political conscience. Unlike Lovers XXX, the story of Robin Byrd is real and is being featured in an HBO documentary, Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story, produced by Sarah Jessica Parker. The documentary highlights Byrd’s historic career running The Robin Byrd Show on Manhattan Public Access Television from 1977 to 1998. The iconic show featured content that had never been seen on television before, including interviews with strippers, sex workers, and queer New Yorkers. She ran phone sex lines and essentially built a direct monetization platform decades before OnlyFans came into existence. 

What Rowbottom’s novel and Byrd’s documentary share, and what the prestige television shows largely miss, is structural honesty. Both ask not “what does this say about the moral character of women who do this work” but “what conditions created this work, who profits from it, and who has always been left holding the consequences.” Those are the harder questions, and they require understanding that the rise of the porn industry, the fight for uncensored content, and OnlyFans are all part of the same story. 

Rowbottom put it plainly: rather than indict another woman for her choices, she asks why that choice was the most profitable or least perilous option available. That reframe from moral judgment to structural analysis is exactly what the current cultural conversation about OnlyFans needs more of. 

Before subscription models and pay-per-view content and Linktree workarounds, there was a woman in a crochet bikini on Manhattan Cable Television’s Channel J, asking porn stars about their lives, demonstrating condom use with a big ol’ grin, and telling her viewer (her “Byrd Watchers”) that she was there for them. It was a parasocial relationship before they existed.

In a time before the creator economy had a name or venture capital support, Robin Byrd created her own business model for content creation. She just didn’t have the internet to scale it.

The Robin Byrd Show ran from 1977 to 1998 on New York public access television. It was a thirty-minute show that ran late at night. Full frontal nudity was more the rule than the exception as Byrd hosted, produced, took viewer calls, interviewed adult performers, strippers, escorts, and queer people of every variety. And she did it all with the energy of someone who genuinely could not understand why sex was supposed to be a source of shame. She also ran phone sex lines (gay, straight, transgender), which created a direct monetization from audience to creator with no corporate middleman setting the terms.

“OnlyFans is phone sex lines with video,” Byrd, now 71, says with the matter-of-fact clarity of someone who has been watching the world catch up to her for fifty years. “People are lonely out there. We have OnlyFans and whatever because I’m not on the air anymore.”

A new HBO Documentary, Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story, produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, makes the full case for Byrd’s place in history. It premiered last night (June 30), but it was long overdue.

Because what Byrd did in that crochet bikini was not just entertainment. She built a community infrastructure for people who had none. Gay men in the AIDS crisis, queer people before “queer” was a reclaimed word, sex workers before “sex worker” had any dignity attached. Byrd preached safer sex not with stigma and wagging fingers but with warmth and the same sex-positive casualness she brought to everything else. When the Reagan administration and Time Warner Cable tried to restrict or scramble adult content on public access, she sued them both. And in 1995, the Supreme Court ruled in her favor, protecting public access from censorship. She didn’t set out to be an activist, but she refused to be stopped.

“I am whatever your fantasy made me to be,” Byrd says in the documentary. “Some people thought, ‘Oh, that porn channel.’ Even people that never saw the show had perceived visions of what I was.”

Every OnlyFans creator knows what she means. The perception precedes the person. The assumption that the work is the whole of the human being. The way “sex worker” functions as a period at the end of a sentence rather than a descriptor among many. Byrd was fighting that reductiveness before most of today’s creators were born, and she fought it not through apology or explanation but rather through sheer relentless visibility.

The structural parallels between what Byrd built and what OnlyFans creators are building now aren’t subtle. Direct creator-to-audience relationship? Check. Subscription and pay-per-interaction monetization? Check. Content suppressed or restricted by institutions controlling distribution? Check. Byrd beat back censorship attempts through the courts. Toady’s creators are fighting similar battles through payment processor negotiations, platform appeals, and the indignity of watching their reach disappear without explanation from the algorithm with no explanation.

What Byrd had that current creators are still fighting for is something harder to quantify: a platform that was genuinely hers. Public access television, for all its limitations, had no Stripe threatening to pull her funding. No shadowbans or trafficking warnings. The distribution was local, and production value was low-budget, but the relationship was between Byrd and her audience in a completely unmediated way. It’s what OnlyFans promises but only partly delivers.

So why is Sarah Jessica Parker producing Byrd’s documentary? Apart from Parker’s long association with the cable network, she explained that she grew up in New York and understands the vital importance of what Byrd did. Parker described Byrd as “completely in possession of herself.” And that’s what the documentary captures, as well as what current creators are reaching for: ownership. Ownership of their work, of the narrative, and of the terms on which they are seen.

“I’m the one that took the arrows for the roads that you are settled into,” Byrd says in the film. “It’s the settlers that get the land, but it’s the pioneers that get the arrows.”

She’s not wrong. Every creator who has normalized adult content online, every platform that treats sex work as legitimate, every conversation that extends basic human dignity to people who monetize intimacy is walking on roads that Byrd and those around her built. The credit rarely flows backward, but it should. And Bang My Box is working to do just that.

The documentary won’t undo fifty years of reductive framing or retroactively pay Byrd what her cultural contribution was worth, but it will put the story on the record. And with a producer like Parker, on a network like HBO, perhaps Byrd will finally get the respect she deserves. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. The conversation about what sex workers deserve is finally happening in public.

Robin Byrd has been ahead of that conversation since 1977, while the rest of us are still catching up. But we’re here now.

Kickstarter tried to ban adult content last month, but like when OnlyFans tried the same strategy a few years ago, it failed dramatically. Because it turns out that people, both creators and consumers, enjoy their adult content and do not want it taken away. 

In May, Kickstarter updated its “mature content” guidelines, expanding restrictions far beyond the platform’s previous baseline of banning pornography and illegal content. The new rule barred anything “created specifically for sexual gratification,” sexual services, hookup platforms, and insertable sexual products. For comic creators in particular, the policy got specific in ways that bordered on absurd. No nude cover variants, no censoring of otherwise non-compliant images, and a flat ban on words including “slut”, “whore”, and “MILF/DILF” anywhere on a project page. 

Comic creators who have been running successful adult-adjacent campaigns on Kickstarter for over a decade were furious. Mike Wolfer, a comics creator with credits alongside Alan Moore and Garth Ennis, published an open letter calling the policy what it actually was: “I’m incredibly disheartened… let’s be honest, here; it IS a ban.” He pointed out the obvious contradiction in Kickstarter’s own language. The guidelines claimed “erotic comics” were still allowed while simultaneously banning any depiction of sex, which is by definition what makes something erotic. Wolfer has been dealing with a year of escalating red flags before the formal policy change, including being told that using the word “nude” in campaign text triggered automatic red flagging, while leaving the same content undescribed somehow didn’t. 

We can’t help but think of Instagram’s recent changes, which seem to do the same thing. Being upfront about what is being shared (i.e., adult content) gets it flagged or shadowbanned, but sharing the same content without disclosure is just fine. 

Kickstarter’s Chief Operating Officer, Sean Leow, pointed the finger squarely at the platform’s payment processor. “The updates to the rules were primarily driven by requirements from our payments processor, Stripe,” Leow said. It’s a familiar excuse. It’s what OnlyFans dealt with, and the same dynamic that Patreon’s Jack Conte recently spoke about. Except there is an obvious hole in Leow’s logic: Stripe is also one of OnlyFans’ primary payment processors. If Stripe’s restrictions were truly the immovable obstacle Leow described, OnlyFans wouldn’t exist in its current form. The more honest read is that Kickstarter made a choice, used Stripe as cover, and got caught. 

But the backlash was immediate and loud. Creators threatened to leave the platform. One user announced she was launching a competitive platform called “Lickstarter.” Another described the experience in terms that will sound familiar to anyone who has followed adult content creators’ relationship with social media platforms: “digital gentrification” and being “evicted” from yet another corner of the internet for doing perfectly legal work. 

Only a week later, Kickstarter reversed course entirely. Leow’s mea culpa was uncharacteristically blunt for corporate messaging: “We botched it. The rules didn’t land the way we intended, and the response from our community let us know loud and clear that we got it wrong. The decision we made was an abandonment of the core counterculture, fuck the establishment spirit of Kickstarter, and it left our community vulnerable.”

Given the current state of things, it’s a rare outcome. Most platform restrictions adult content creators deal with don’t reverse. Instagram is still issuing trafficking warnings on OnlyFans searches. Alabama’s regulatory gauntlet isn’t being repealed. Grok keeps flagging adult posts on X while running on adult content. The pattern, with very few exceptions, is that one a restriction is enacted, it stays. No matter how loudly creators object. 

The difference for Kickstarter (and perhaps Patreon) is the financial threat. When established creators with years of successful campaigns and engaged backers represent real, trackable revenue, the threat of losing them en masse is real and immediate. For Instagram and other platforms, there is no risk of financial loss. 

Kickstarter’s about-face is a good outcome and a useful reminder that public pressure can work. But it’s also worth noting what made this case different. It took organized, established creators with real leverage, fast and loud collective action, and a platform whose business model actually depended on keeping them happy. Most adult content creators don’t have that kind of leverage. Most of them are facing this fight alone, one shadowbanned post at a time. 

Recent research has revealed that half of all traffic on Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, is driven by explicit images, videos, adult roleplay, and other pornographic content. xAI, the company behind Grok, is actively building tools to generate this kind of material on purpose. By any reasonable definition, that would make it an adult content platform. 

Yet if you intentionally post adult content on X, Grok flags it, labels it unsafe for advertisers, and removes it from the recommendation pool entirely. Strangers cannot find you, and your reach is capped at people who already follow you. You’re coded out of discovery by the same AI that is cannibalizing the content you create. 

In May, X rewrote the algorithm behind its For You feed, and the changes were not subtle. Posts carrying adult or explicit labels were downranked and removed from recommendations entirely. The AI doing the flagging is Grok. Adult content that gets the most aggressive review pipeline on the entire platform, complete with a Grok-generated label that marks your post as not safe for advertisers. Meanwhile, xAI is doubling down on explicit video and image generation tools because that’s what is keeping its traffic numbers from completely collapsing. Grok’s website traffic dropped 22% between January and May, the steepest decline of any major chatbot this year. Adult content is the only thing propping it up. 

Essentially, one company is profiting from adult content while its brother is trying to erase it. But both are owned by Elon Musk. 

This isn’t a new dynamic for creators. It’s the same pattern that plays out across every major platform like Instagram, but it is rarely this nakedly documented. When a creator earns money from explicit content, she gets debanked, deplatformed, shadowbanned and pushed out of the way. When a tech company does it, it’s called a growth strategy. 

But it’s so much more than platform hypocrisy. Grok’s image tools have been used to “undress” photos of real people, frequently without their consent. Watchdog reports and media investigations have documented failures in Grok’s safeguards involving sexualized depcitions of minors. There is an active lawsuit in California alleging that images of teenage girls, two under 18, were altered by a Grok user in overtly sexual ways. Musk has said that he is “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok,” which is the kind of statement that raises more questions than it answers.

So, what should OnlyFans creators who often use platforms like X do? 

First, stop building your discovery strategy on X like it is a neutral tool. It isn’t. It’s actually designed to exclude you from organic reach. That’s not speculation; it’s documented in their code changes. But if you do want to stay on X, try using two accounts. One clean, safe-for-work account for reach and audience building, and a second adult account for conversion. Never cross streams, and don’t expect the adult account to be found by anyone that you don’t send there directly. 

Second, protect your content. Every image and video you post publicly is potentially training data. To try to avoid this, add visible watermarks to everything. I don’t mean a little logo in the corner. Overlay text on the content itself. You can also post lower-resolution images and video publicly and keep high-resolution content behind a paywall. This may not stop AI from stealing your content, but it will help. Also try to opt-out of AI training in all account settings. Actually read the terms of service before you say yes. 

Finally, diversify aggressively. You can’t rely on one social media platform to create traffic for you. You are at risk of losing your account on any platform at any time. Create duplicate and backup accounts. And don’t overlook an email list. They aren’t glamorous, but they can’t be taken from you. 

The simple truth is that OnlyFans creators are a resource being mined while also being told they don’t belong. The sooner creators realize the hypocrisy and adjust their strategy, the better off they will be. 

Real creators weigh in on the proposed online safety legislation. 

The UK government recently announced one of the most sweeping overhauls of online safety law in the country’s history. The idea is protecting kids online, with the plan that children under 16 should be banned from major social media sites, including Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook, and X. These protections are expected to come into effect by spring 2027. The law will also block under-16 use of livestreaming and communicating with strangers online, making the new romantic and/or sexual AI chatbots restricted to adult-only use. 

Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it “a line in the sand,” backed by a national consultation that drew over 116,000 responses. Nine in ten parents said they supported the ban, and on paper, it sounds like exactly the kind of decisive action that parents have been demanding for years. 

But for social media influencers, adult content professionals, and OnlyFans models, the announcement landed differently. Because buried inside the good intention is the question nobody in Westminster seems particularly interested in answering: what happens to the legal adult industry when the government starts pulling on these threads? 

The proposal doesn’t target adult content directly. It doesn’t have to. The infrastructure required to enforce and under-16 social media ban (think age verification at scale, stricter content moderation, tighter platform controls) has a way of catching legal adult creators in the crossfire. It’s already happening in other parts of the world (Alabama has recently made headlines with their new laws), and creators worry about what will happen in the UK if this goes through. 

UK-based creator Lily Phillips knows this dynamic firsthand. “Obviously, if they do exactly as they say, then I think that’s amazing,” she explained. “I’m not sure exactly how they’re going to do it without further cracking down on sexual expression of adults, which is a worry for me because we already get discriminated against on social media platforms when we are abiding by the social media platform rules.” Phillips points out an issue that is already plaguing Instagram: “A lingerie or bikini brand can post a lot more explicit content than what a sex worker could.” The new rules seem to be codifying the standards that Instagram has already implemented. But more aggressive moderation won’t fix the problem. It’ll amplify it.

Australian creator Emily Mai agrees that protecting children online is non-negotiable, but she’s skeptical about who actually bears the costs of these measures. “These safeguards also damage the consenting and safe parts of the adult industry,” she said. “It makes it harder for consenting adults to work and actually makes it easier for non-consenting content to get accessed, because people turn to the dark web for content.” It’s a point that Scotland’s children’s commissioner Nicola Killean echoed from a child safety angle, warning that blanket bans risk pushing children to less regulated corners of the internet. The same logic applies to adults: restricting legal platforms aggressively doesn’t eliminate demand, it just redirects it somewhere else. And that place could be much darker than Instagram. 

Kit Barrus, a creator based in the United States, has a more fundamental objection. “My first immediate reaction is that censorship, extreme censorship in particular, is almost never a good thing,” she said. She’s also skeptical that the ban will work at all. “I think that no matter what restrictions the government poses, no matter what they try to do, kids will find a way around it.” Her preferred alternative? Better parental controls rather than a government-mandated blanket ban. But she’s also watching something bigger with concern: “Porn is already a villain in most people’s eyes, so it’s a really easy way for the government to go, ‘Well, since you guys all hate this, let us censor it.’ Slowly, people start giving the government more and more permissions.”

Fellow American creator Alix Lynx drew a clear line between child protection (which she supports without reservation) and overreach into adult autonomy. “Adults can smoke cigarettes, go to war, and vote, so they should be able to watch pornography and make their own choices,” she said. She’s already experiencing the practical reality of aggressive moderation. “On Instagram, I’ve had my account marked as not eligible for recommendation because of posts that didn’t violate any rules. I see other creators posting similar or more revealing content without any consequences. I do believe sex workers and adult creators are often targeted more aggressively by moderation systems.”

That’s the core tension that the UK government hasn’t resolved. The mechanics of protecting children online by way of age verification, content filtering, and stricter platform enforcement don’t exist in a vacuum. They are applied by platforms that already moderate adult content creators unevenly. Adding more regulatory pressure to the system doesn’t create a safer internet for anyone. It punishes legal creators for their honesty and integrity while identical content thrives under a different name on a darker platform. 

The UK government wants to draw a line in the sand. Creators just want to know why they keep ending up on the wrong side of it, even when they’ve done nothing wrong. 

Or at least out of the state. OnlyFans creators are paying the price – literally. 

Alabama has long had a complicated relationship with adult content, but over the last couple of years, it has quietly become one of the most hostile jurisdictions in the entire United States. The state is set to collect 10% of revenue on adult content, is actively trying to make it more difficult to access (and not just for minors), and if not, outright outlaw the industry entirely. 

All OnlyFans creators should be keeping a close eye on what’s going on, even if they don’t live near the state. Because what happens in Alabama may not be an isolated case. 

In 2024, Alabama passed House Bill 164, a sweeping piece of legislation that layers multiple restrictions on adult content into one tidy package of legal headaches. The headline provision is the 10% tax on gross receipts from adult website content, including subscriptions, memberships, performances, and anything else remotely related, that is  “produced, sold, filmed, generated, or otherwise based in” the state. The language is interesting, because in theory it could mean that OnlyFans as a company also must pay 10% of the money made from Alabama-based creators, as well as 10% of the money paid by Alabama subscribers/buyers. 

The state’s Department of Revenue has also begun contacting adult websites about setting up “Material Harmful to Minors tax accounts,” despite the fact that many adult websites proactively block Alabama users thanks to the age verification requirements that require adult website users to grant access. It’s not that these platforms are against ensuring minors can’t access their platforms. It’s that the law puts these companies in a bind by simultaneously requiring them to verify users are of age by reviewing government-issued ID, third-party verification services, or biometric data, yet also prohibiting them from retaining that personal information. That conundrum spurred many platforms to simply block the entire state of Alabama from accessing their sites. No access, no legal headaches. 

But that decision impacts Alabama-based creators. While OnlyFans hasn’t blocked the state yet, they could decide that complying with Alabama’s new laws isn’t worth it and take that action. Which means that a creator based in Birmingham who has built a following and a revenue stream could find herself effectively locked out of the platform. Not because she did anything wrong, but because Alabama made the legal environment too hostile for the company to operate in.  

But that’s not all. There’s also a notarization requirement, which may be the most creative part of this whole thing. Any commercial entity publishing content must obtain written performer consent documents that aren’t just signed, but are also sworn before a notary public and retained for years. This isn’t typically how content creation works. Most independent contractors do get signed permission before shooting content, but they rarely have a notary around to sign off. Under this law, someone filming solo content in her apartment in Alabama could potentially be required to physically appear before a notary for every piece of content she produces, which is both a significant logistical (and potentially financial) burden…or an effective deterrent. Which is, of course, the point.  

HB 164 also mandates a warning label on adult sites containing statements that have already been found unconstitutional in Texas, including claims that pornography “weakens brain function” and “increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography”. These aren’t established facts; they‘re just moral panic. Despite a Texas judge already ruling on this language, Alabama included it anyway. 

The constitutional questions are real, as lawful adult content is protected speech under the First Amendment. Content-based taxes on protected speech require even more scrutiny, and organizations like the Free Speech Coalition have taken notice. Their executive director noted that in a pre-2025 legal world, this would have been a clear case of unconstitutional selective taxation. But recent Supreme Court cases have shifted the ground enough that they’re not sure anymore. While the law may be ambiguous, the intent is not. When Pornhub blocked Alabama users instead of complying, state Representative Ben Robbins celebrated. Because for many in the Alabama government, the goal was never protecting kids. It was getting rid of access to porn. 

Alabama isn’t the only state trying to regulate the adult industry. Several others have taken steps as well, and it’s leaving creators worried about the long-term impact on their livelihoods. Some may be forced to relocate to other states to continue what they’ve worked so hard to build. 

While Alabama may not be cracking down on OnlyFans creators as hard as Russia, what they’re doing isn’t that dissimilar. Both governments are restricting what their citizens can and can’t do with online content.

And showrunner Sam Levinson is doubling down. 

Euphoria has been a magnet for pearl-clutching outrage since creator Sam Levinson brought the show to HBO (adapting it from the Israeli series), but the final season that recently wrapped up outraged a whole different kind of viewer: real OnlyFans creators. 

The third and final season of the show leaned hard into the platform as a plot device. Cassie, the show’s designated disaster girl, played by Sydney Sweeney decides to become a creator, with former best friend Maddy sliding into the role of talent manager for what Maddy correctly identifies as a “booming industry.” She’s not wrong, but the way Levinson handled the storyline sure was. 

To start, Levinson put Sweeney in a diaper with a pacifier. The scene went viral so much that even OnlyFans megastar Sophie Rain commented on it, saying it “should almost be illegal.” And if a real creator tried it, it actually would be. OnlyFans explicitly prohibits age-related roleplay content. The scene depicted something the platform bans while presenting it as just another Tuesday in the creator economy.

That’s the core problem, and what real creators noticed immediately. 

Social media influencer and teen OnlyFans creator Alina Rose quickly came out and claimed the show makes creators look “like something we’re not.” She went on to explain that she’s never personally seen creators behave the way Cassie does on screen and that Hollywood keeps reaching for the most sensationalized version of the story because nuance doesn’t create views. After all, a scene of someone doing keyword research and scheduling posts doesn’t exactly pop on a prestige drama. 

Perhaps that’s why Levinson leaned into the more taboo sides of OnlyFans on this season, but it doesn’t explain why he has such a pattern of misrepresenting the sex-work industry. In an earlier season, there is a storyline in which Kat (a minor) explores online dominatrix work. While it was framed as edgy empowerment, OnlyFans model and mainstream porn star Naomi Noel saw it more as a depiction of fictional child sex trafficking dressed up as a coming-of-age arc. Her theory is that Levinson’s shows don’t destigmatize sex work as much as they offer a voyeuristic and often unrealistic look into the industry. Noel believes that he gets close enough to feel provocative and make headlines without doing the actual work of humanizing anyone involved. 

And Noel does admit that while Levinson gave porn actress Chloe Cherry “her break, I don’t believe Euphoria is positive for sex work or women in general. The show is very male gaze-y at this point, even though it started out great.”

Taylor Vixxen, former financial exec turned OnlyFans model, doesn’t place the blame solely on Levinson. She believes it’s a broader failure in media as a whole: “Mainstream media often frames [OnlyFans] as either a quick-money fantasy or a cautionary tale.” Euphoria landed firmly in cautionary tale territory, and Levinson made sure you knew it.

That’s not speculation. Levinson recently appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and defended the Cassie storyline as a meditation on the “long-term consequences” of the creator economy, describing the platform as something that “hollows out the individual”. Levinson wanted to explore young people being told they’re “the product, the brand” as they chase fast cash. 

Meanwhile, Bill Maher called Maddy “the moral center” for a line about not being a hooker. Levinson pushed back, calling Maddy’s management role “sort of light pimping.” The two seemingly had a great time mocking the livelihood of thousands of women, but Levinson did take the time to wonder if they’d have faced the same backlash if they’d “affirmed this life” instead of critiquing it. I guess the world will never know. 

But here’s what real creators do know, and are happy to share if anyone in Hollywood would bother to ask: OnlyFans is a business. A real one, with content calendars and SEO and analytics and brand strategy and the kind of relentless admin work that is definitely not cinematic. Comedian and creator Gracie Canaan described it as requiring “grit, strategy, and consistency.” Sure, there is tons of money to be made. But it’s not exactly the easy money fantasy that’s shown on these shows, with only 1% of users earning 33% of all revenue on the platform.

Another show that heavily featured OnlyFans this year was Margo’s Got Money Troubles on AppleTV. While the show does hit on the quick-money fantasy vs cautionary tale theory that Vixxen put forth (Margo manages to make money fairly quickly while also dealing with fallout from her decision to join the platform that concludes in a dramatic courtroom custody battle), it at least stays closer to reality according to real OnlyFans creators. Sure, it’s not perfect but at least they showed Margo doing market research and much of the behind-the-scenes work that is left out of other shows. 

In 2026, OnlyFans isn’t going to stop being a plot point. It’s too culturally loaded and too often misunderstood, making it perfect fodder for viral articles that will get the publicity that networks love. Maybe one day we’ll see a show that can handle the real side of OnlyFans. But it probably won’t be found on HBO.