No verification will be bulletproof, and persistent people will occasionally get around it. I'm not sure what responsibility OnlyFans has beyond taking reasonable measures to prevent circumventing verification. The article mentions someone using their older sister's license as verification. Presumably they look similar. And that's somehow OnlyFan's fault? There's no reason why the executives would have any sort of personal liability.
The anti-vice authoritarians will always come after any lucrative porn enterprise with these sensationalized stories. I'm surprised there are still people out there that eat it up.
Read your comment again and realize what you are saying. This thread has more than 800 comments on the different online billing strategies and payment providers...Here you have an extensive well researched article of the BBC, with two different law enforcement officers confirming this is happening and you are arguing its not their responsibility? Who is the enabler here?
> Here you have an extensive well researched article of the BBC, with two different law enforcement officers confirming this is happening
Why would the BBC or the police be worthy of trust? It’s ironic to trust their word when the article goes over the ways the site tries to verify identity and hence age, and they seem reasonable, far more reasonable than trusting the police because they’re the police.
I’m not going to post up my passport but I didn’t come down in the last shower.
The question of liability for the site given reasonable verification measures is still an open question. For example, Tracy Lords was a popular porn star of the 80s until she outed herself as having been underage in her films. The FBI investigated the porn industry and no one was found liable as she used a fake ID and the producers had it on file. The idea that there is endless liability for producers when someone circumvents their verification just isn't true.
> The FBI investigated the porn industry and no one was found liable as she used a fake ID and the producers had it on file.
WHOA! That's not true.
At least one of her fellow "actors" went to jail for it and I think some of the staff only avoided jail by cutting plea bargains but still wound up with felonies.
There is a reason why so many people were angry when Traci Lords started getting "legitimate" roles after having destroyed a lot of people's lives.
Child porn is a strict liability crime in most cases of the US. Yeah, the justice system generally applies some common sense (ie. not convicting two 16 year olds sending each other selfies), but that is completely at the whim of the system and doesn't always hold true.
This doesn't seem accurate according to a cursory search. While I was incorrect that no one was prosecuted for it, it seems that charged were eventually dropped after the court ruled that strict liability in this case would violate the first amendment[1]
>Our reading of the relevant Supreme Court opinions, particularly Smith v. California, suggests that the first amendment does not permit the imposition of criminal sanctions on the basis of strict liability where doing so would seriously chill protected speech. While Congress may take steps to punish severely those who knowingly subject minors to sexual exploitation, and even those who commit such abuse recklessly or negligently, it may not impose very serious criminal sanctions on those who have diligently investigated the matter and formed a reasonable good-faith belief that they are engaged in activities protected by the first amendment.
> Gottesman was found guilty of violating the 1977 Child Sexual Exploitation Act, but appealed the lower court verdict all the way to U. S. Supreme Court, claiming that he should not be held liable for using underage girls if they lied about their age.
> No one, including Lords or her scene partners, ever went to jail over the scandal, but it led to several court cases and tougher laws regulating the adult industry.
"Never went to jail" does not exclude "Cut a deal but still wound up with a felony conviction". However, apparently my memory was faulty about someone going to jail.
Unfortunately, everything about the case is old enough that it doesn't appear well in search engines. And that's without the fact that everything is going to be drowned out in search engines by being proximate to "traci lords".
"The guidelines for enforcing these laws require producers of sexually explicit material to obtain proof of age for every model they shoot, and retain those records. Federal inspectors may at any time launch inspections of these records and prosecute any infraction."
From the article...I am also amazed at the downvotes.
======================
Schools have shared anonymous reports of pupils using the site, including a 16-year-old who boasted to her careers adviser about the amount of money she made on the site, and showed off her "exuberant" spending on Instagram.
Underage creators and users of the site include victims of prior sexual abuse and those with mental health issues and suicidal thoughts, according to Childline counsellor notes.
UK police forces say children have complained about their images being uploaded to the site without consent, and one 17-year-old reported being blackmailed.
Missing children are appearing in OnlyFans videos, according to a US watchdog, which also says it has received reports of child sexual exploitation.
"It is increasingly clear that OnlyFans is being used by children," says chief constable Simon Bailey, the UK's child protection lead.
"The company is not doing enough to put in place the safeguards that prevent children exploiting the opportunity to generate money, but also for children to be exploited."
In a statement, OnlyFans says it could not respond specifically to the anonymous reports we were told about without the account details.
OK, let's say that 17 is fine. What about just a year younger? Maybe only 6 months? As a society(well, mostly), it was decided to draw it at 18. Where do YOU draw the line?
I don't draw it at age, I draw it at coercion. If someone is pressuring someone else into uploading nakes pics that's bad, age would just be an aggravating factor in the badness when deciding how much to punish.
While the idea of a six year old uploading naked pics makes me extremely uncomfortable I think that's a parenting issue (something has probably gone very wrong and that's what needs fixing, not the symptom of posting online), not something to be governed at the payment processor level.
Well really, I think it's the responsibility of the parents. In an ideal world, a parent can decide when their child is mentally ready to engage in an industry like that, and can also decide where the line is safe (teases? partial nudity? full softcore? hardcore? intense BDSM?)
The reality of course though is that not every child has a responsible parent, and many children have parents who would happily exploit their children to make a couple thousand extra dollars (which really sucks, but it's also just how the world is). So as a general legal policy, putting the burden on parents may lead to substantially more harm of children.
In my theoretical system, I would implement a testing process that determines if a person is mentally competent to make legal, financial, contractual and overall life decisions. The courts in the U.S. already do this under specific circumstances and can give a child limited recognition as an adult and that is determined entirely by a judge. I would just take it a step further and have a certification that would be noted on a state ID card rather than depending on specific legal circumstances. Generalizing a persons capabilities to make such decisions by biological age is problematic. Some people are not ready to make life altering decisions at their states/regions age of majority whereas some people are prepared to make such decisions sooner than others. This would not be perfect, but probably more scientific of a process than basing a decision on biological age. Who creates the test? Likely a panel of clinical psychologists, biologists, lawyers. Who administers the test? Schools for free, some job sites paid by employer, lawyers for a fee.
So what happens if a person never passes the test at any point in their life?
Good question. Perhaps a more in-depth analysis of the person would be required to understand why they are not passing the test.
What happens when X or Y minority group claims the test is biased against them?
This is an existing pattern and I would defer to the legal system to mirror the existing processes. This pattern is replete throughout all intersections of society and government.
Also your claim is that an intelligent person who could perform well on an examination wouldn't also make risky sexual decisions when they are young?
I never said intelligent. I said "if a person is mentally competent to make legal, financial, contractual and overall life decisions". These things are not directly tied to intelligence alone and intelligence can be interpreted to mean many different things. The test would be written and reviewed yearly by clinical psychologists, biologists and lawyers. The current process for this that already exists depends entirely on a judge which is just a more experienced lawyer and a single persons judgement call that may be biased by their personal beliefs. I believe my suggestion would be a vast improvement over the existing system and would make it easier for kids put into precarious situations to move forward in life rather than sitting in emergency foster care at the mercy of strangers if they don't actually require it.
I personally know of a few people including a close friend that went through this process. She was declared an adult at age 14 and was appointed guardianship over her brother as the legal guardian with full custody. She handled this perfectly but all of this was the decision of a single judge. This is of course not the same as legally being at the age of majority/consent. In my method, there would be certifications for different aspects of responsibility much like endorsements for a car or aircraft license. These would be endorsements on their state ID.
Thanks for explaining what this is about. There are lots of sites our there where sex workers ply their trade, and as far as I can tell have been allowed to do so by the payment processors for literally decades. The dozens of caming sites for a start. OnlyFans being banned for it while other sites are doing it far more openly would be bizarre.
However those sites now all have strong 230 compliance regimes, and I gather OnlyFans doesn't. OnlyFans could have implemented something similar. PornHub went down that route when confronted with similar pressure - they got of rid of all video's that went compliant. But OnlyFans.com have chosen not to. I wonder why?
"The children selling explicit videos on OnlyFans"
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57255983