Having built its company on the backs of sex workers who sold adult content to fans directly, OnlyFans has slapped these creators in the face with a change of policy.

A report from Bloomberg that is yet to be officially confirmed by OnlyFans via its own blog, reveals that sexually explicit content will no longer be allowed on the website starting in October.

While Bloomberg reports that the change is needed because of pressure from OnlyFans’ banking partners and payment providers. That’s rather odd because websites like Pornhub only started facing that sort of pressure when investigations revealed that illegal content was flooding the adult video site.

Well, it seems odd until you read through this report from the BBC which reveals that OnlyFans may have been forced to adopt this position due to poor moderation of its own doing.

A so-called “compliance manual” was leaked to the BBC which reveals that staff at OnlyFans were more lenient than they should’ve been as regards content that was prohibited on the website.

Moderators gave creators who posted content that was not allowed per the terms of service, multiple warnings before closing accounts. OnlyFans also didn’t take action against users advertising physical encounters, despite that being against its own terms of service.

Worse still, the BBC reports that it set up two subscriber accounts explicitly stating they are teenagers and the accounts were active for a week before the BBC contacted OnlyFans.

Many creators have slammed OnlyFans for turning its back on the people who helped build the company to the heights it occupies today and while that might be the case, the crux of the matter is that OnlyFans did not police its own forum as well as it should have.

While comparisons have been drawn to Tumblr, this feels more like OnlyFans chose the Parler path in that it let users post content which was against its terms of service and did the bare minimum to address that.

We feel for the creators who found success through OnlyFans posting content that was permitted, only to now have the rug pulled out from under them.

Not that this is altogether a bad thing. The fact that many creators found out about this change via news reports and not OnlyFans itself should be taken as a sign that perhaps creators are better off working on a platform that values them.