[bigdollopenergy]

Doubt it. This IMO is probably the best PR maneuver ever conceived. I doubt they ever planned to do it.

The BBC was just about to release a long-researched exposé about all the moderation issues they have and how child porn and abuse were going unchecked on their platform. This was a supposed to be a huge deal that could destroy them if the media at large rallied around that story like they did with Pornhub. By making this announcement before it came out they stole the narrative and switched the focus away from that problem and towards the issue of what are all the sex workers going to do when they suddenly lose their income and also just how crazy the announcement was in of itself.

They did it with perfect timing and drummed up such a fuss with such a wild and seemingly out of nowhere change that when that article actually dropped, it was merely background noise and not the primary focus of media coverage. The media likes to hyper-focus on issues for a short period of time (with a few exceptions, trump/covid/amazon being a few) and then quickly move on regardless of whether the issue/story has finished or resolved itself in anyway. Which is what will likely happen here, OnlyFans will likely make it through this mostly unscathed and with a ton of publicity.

[disruptthelaw]

This is the most plausible explanation in my opinion.

OF we’re in the potential firing line so they rallied their user base and created a strong narrative.

They can now say that they tried to limit porn but too many vulnerable people would suffer as a result.

It’s a brilliant maneuver if this is what happened.

[Ansil849]

> The BBC was just about to drop a long-researched exposé

Source?

[bigdollopenergy]

It's been an ongoing story ramping up since May, but this I believe is the main story with all the research they did.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58255865

[miracle2k]

Oh god, what typically terrible, tendentious journalism.

This is the kind of article that tries to dish up dozens of random allegations, intermixing them in strange ways, hoping that what sticks with the reader is a general sense of wrong-doing.

Among other things, it tries to imply that Only Fans somehow allows "big" accounts to post child porn multiple times with a warning, including by misusing the world "illegal". In reality, and pending evidence to the contrary, it is instead reasonable to assume that Only Fans will let people get away with a warning for a terms of service violation, which is entirely a different thing.

[strogonoff]

> This is the kind of article that tries to dish up dozens of random allegations, intermixing them in strange ways, hoping that what sticks with the reader is a general sense of wrong-doing.

Literally the first paragraph is the smoking gun:

> Internal documents, leaked to BBC News, reveal that OnlyFans allows moderators to give multiple warnings to accounts that post illegal content on its online platform before deciding to close them.

I.e., they literally allowed their users to post illegal stuff (apparently including CSAM, according to the guy from US Homeland Security they quote?) and keep making money, rather than reporting such cases. The rest is secondary. BBC editors are actually usually good at applying the inverted pyramid principle.

[voxic11]

Maybe I am missing something but that is not how I understand the BBC article. The article doesn't specify exactly what the illegal content mentioned in the leaked documents is. It could simply be copyright violations or similar, which every major content site also turns a blind eye to unless they receive a formal DMCA notice.

So I am not seeing anything to support your claim that:

> they literally allowed their users to post illegal stuff (apparently including CSAM, according to the guy from US Homeland Security they quote)

The homeland security agent also does not appear to ever say that onlyfans intentionally allows such content. It seems his only contribution to the article is the observation that a large volume of CSAM he sees on other sites appear to originate on onlyfans. This is the entire section of the article which mentions him.

> Special agent Austin Berrier, from US Homeland Security, specialises in investigating child exploitation online. He estimates he finds between 20-30 child abuse images a week which he says have clearly originated on OnlyFans. He says every internet forum he has visited as part of his investigations in the past six months or so, has included child abuse images from OnlyFans. Most of them are videos that were live streamed on the site. In some of them, children are receiving direction - he says.

> "It's out there, it's all over the place and it's being widely traded."

[strogonoff]

> The homeland security agent also does not appear to ever say that onlyfans intentionally allows such content. It seems his only contribution to the article is the observation that a large volume of CSAM he sees on other sites appear to originate on onlyfans.

The three strikes policy creates a vehicle of exploitation. First two strikes an abuser posts something illegal OF doesn’t ban or report them, and in fact helpfully lets them know. Subsequently, in future uploads, they obscure any observable illegality to not trigger moderation, but their followers (which they didn’t lose, because they didn’t get banned) know what they’re really about and together with OF enable the abuser to keep making money.

[Ansil849]

Ah, I now realize you meant 'drop' as in 'release', I misread the context and thought you meant 'drop' as in 'abandon'. My mistake!

[fragmede]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke

[webkike]

They’ll just publish the article again. I don’t see why that type of controversy would just go away.