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.”