Jamie F
OnlyFans has been on the receiving end of a triple-swipe attack from a US law firm at the end of February, 2022. Three lawsuits were filed against the platform, including accusations that it sabotaged the social media profiles of content creators using rival services.
The Milberg Coleman Bryson Grossman law firm accused OnlyFans of paying bribes to staff at an unspecified social media company, to put the accounts of some creators using rival sites on a terrorism database. This allegedly resulted in some social media accounts being disabled.
The law firm filed suits against OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky and Fenix Internet LLC, which handles OnlyFans’ payments. One of the three suits, which contained similar accusations, was filed on behalf of FanCentro, a rival site to OnlyFans. Another was filed on behalf of three adult entertainment workers. The third was filed on behalf of Justfor.fans, another OnlyFans alternative.
OnlyFans, founded in the UK in 2016, rode to success largely thanks to porn creators posting paid-for explicit content on the site, said that the accusations had “no merit”.
Among the suits was the disputed claim that many rival sites to OnlyFans were blacklisted by the unspecified social media firm in 2018. FanCentro said that social media content posted by some creators promoting rival OnlyFans platforms was placed on the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, which records digital signatures and is usually used to stop terrorist-related images spreading.
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat are members of the GIFCT, meaning that any content flagged by the system will be flagged across all these platforms, potentially leading to the removal of the content.
“We are not aware of any evidence which supports the allegations in these complaints. OnlyFans, Facebook, Meta [which owns Facebook] and the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism have publicly stated that these allegations have no merit,” an OnlyFans spokesperson told XBiz.
While OnlyFans denies the accusations, the attention the lawsuits have generated adds to the company’s public image woes over the past year. Porn creator trust in the platform was significantly damaged in 2021 after it announced a ban on explicit content, then quickly performed a reverse ferret following a public backlash.
In December 2021 Tim Stokely, who founded OnlyFans, announced that he was stepping down as the chief executive of parent company Fenix International Limited. Amrapali Gan, who joined OnlyFans in 2020 and worked as chief marketing and communications officer of the site, has replaced him.
