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OnlyFans has built a billion-dollar business on the promise of creator empowerment and the language of consent. It has also, by the account of law enforcement, child advocates, and its own filed reports, become one of the most consequential pipelines for the sexual exploitation of minors in the digital age. The question is whether anyone in a position to change that has any serious intention of doing so.

She was thirteen years old when she was first trafficked to New York. Her trafficker, who had identified her through social media and spent weeks cultivating what she understood, at the time, to be a relationship, eventually assaulted her and filmed the footage. He sold it on OnlyFans. Two years passed before she was found. By then, the content had circulated to places that law enforcement could not fully trace, had been viewed by people who paid for it and by others who extracted it and shared it elsewhere for free, and had done what such material always does to the person at its center — it had made her exploitation permanent, archivable, retrievable forever by anyone with the inclination to look.

Her case is not exceptional. What is exceptional is that it was documented. For every case of child sexual abuse material on OnlyFans that has resulted in an arrest, a legal filing, a news report, a name attached to a charge, there are — by the consistent estimate of researchers, investigators, and child protection organizations — dozens more that have not. The platform's subscription paywall, which is the mechanism by which OnlyFans collects its twenty percent of every transaction, is also the mechanism by which its content is shielded from the kind of open-source investigation that has allowed law enforcement to build cases against exploitation on other platforms. You cannot see what is behind the wall without paying to get there. The evidence costs money to find. Most police departments don't have the budget for it. The children in those videos remain, in the practical sense, unfound.

This is the business OnlyFans is in. It is not the business the company's public materials describe. The company, which is owned by the British holding entity Fenix International and reported revenues of $1.3 billion in its most recent filing, describes itself in the language of empowerment and safety. Its anti-trafficking statement, published annually, pledges to act with integrity and mitigate the risks of modern slavery. Its transparency policy states that it knows who its bad actors are, reports them to law enforcement, and bans them. The distance between that language and the documented reality is the subject of this piece.