TikTok accused of helping to promote sex industry to girls

Researchers say popular performers covertly market OnlyFans content and tell followers about wealthy lifestyle

TikTok is helping to promote and normalise the sex industry, allowing “sexfluencers” to post videos aimed at marketing pornographic content they have uploaded elsewhere on sites such as OnlyFans, a report indicates.

After studying non-explicit content posted on TikTok over the course of a year by some of OnlyFans’ most popular young female performers, researchers said the women buried coded references to pornography in “girly lifestyle content” that showed them shopping, playing with their pets, baking or offering skincare advice.

While mentioning OnlyFans or directly linking to OnlyFans from TikTok accounts is prohibited, euphemisms, emojis and crude gestures are used to indicate that performers’ adult content is available for sale on other platforms. TikTok prohibits sexual solicitation, including invitations to share explicit images, but the platform distributes so-called safe-for-work material produced by popular OnlyFans performers.

The report analyses how hints about adult content are hidden in widely shared TikToks that show OnlyFans stars filming their hair and makeup routine for “get ready with me” posts – known by the acronym GRWM. Performers may use the word “corn” instead of the word “porn”, or add the corn emoji next to a star emoji, to avoid the content being blocked.

The “TikTok to OnlyFans pipeline” study was conducted by researchers from the campaigning organisations Cease (Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation) in the UK and Collective Shout in Australia. Researchers spent months scrolling through posts from a number of key “sexfluencers” and then following recommendations offered up by TikTok’s algorithm.

In viral posts, OnlyFans performers told their followers on TikTok about the money they had earned from selling sexual content. “One of the most pervasive messages across these posts is that selling sexual services on OnlyFans gives you a fabulous life – a life filled with freedom, fun, friendship and lots of money,” the report states.

Many posts promoted this message with images of cash, big houses, private jets and expensive cars, beneath headlines such as “how it feels knowing I own all of this at 23 thanks to 250,000 men”.

In some posts, OnlyFans was presented as the answer to poverty and unemployment by performers who described rag-to-riches stories. Opening an OnlyFans account was marketed as a solution, “rescuing women and girls from bleak, underprivileged lives, gifting them with the nice, luxury items that they – and their struggling families – have always deserved”, the report says.

OnlyFans’ own data indicates that its top 5,000 creators have made more than $1m each on the site since the platform launched in 2016. But the average earnings of the site’s 5 million registered performers are estimated to be about $1,000 a year, the report states.

Melinda Tankard Reist, of Collective Shout, condemned TikTok as “an industrial-scale digital pimp funnelling girls into the sex industry”. She said: “It is our view that young women and girls deserve to be protected from a predatory industry grooming them to be producers of explicit content.”

Tankard Reist said the research was commissioned in response to an awareness that OnlyFans stars such as Sophie Rain and Ari Kytsya had a huge following on TikTok among teenage girls, and concern that they were using the site to promote benefits of creating pornography.

Rain became famous with content filmed in the “Bop House”, a luxury pornography production house in Miami, which is home to a rotating group of women who sell sexual content on OnlyFans. Auditions to join the Bop House are shared on TikTok and would-be recruits respond by posting sexually suggestive dances tagging Bop House recruitment.

OnlyFans performers rely on building up their followers on TikTok and other social media platforms, so they have become adept at finding ways to make subtle nods to the presence of explicit content that is for sale elsewhere. The report focuses on the ties between TikTok and OnlyFans because TikTok has such a high proportion of young users and because it is where the careers of many on OnlyFans start out.

Many OnlyFans stars do brand promotion alongside their lifestyle content on TikTok, advertising household items such as pet food, burgers and pineapple juice, as well as sex toys and condoms. The global cosmetics brand L’Oréal last year appointed Kytsya – who refers to herself as a “mattress actress” – as a brand ambassador for Urban Decay, a makeup brand popular with teenagers and sold globally. In these advertisements, viewed millions of times on TikTok, she calls for makeup that performs well on mattresses.

The report’s authors have called for an extension of the ban that exists in many countries on showing explicitly pornographic content to under-18s so that it also includes posts that promote or are related to the sex industry.

A TikTok spokesperson said: “TikTok strictly prohibits the sharing or showing of sexual content and we use advanced technologies to enforce our community guidelines. In addition, our systems are designed to prevent age-inappropriate content from reaching teens.”

An OnlyFans spokesperson said: “OnlyFans is a platform for people aged 18 and over and we have strict onboarding processes to prevent minors accessing the platform.”