One of the most progressive nations in the world has banned people from purchasing services on the pornographic platform OnlyFans, saying online acts are no different than prostitution.

The Swedish Parliament, the Riksdag, has passed a new law forbidding people from offering OnlyFans webcam performers money in exchange for performing a specific sexual act. Under the new law, which takes effect July 1, anyone found guilty of buying a personalized sexual act (but not those selling it) face up to one year in prison, and anyone guilty of financially exploiting the person carrying out the sex act could face four years in prison.

“This is a new form of sex sales and it is high time that we modernize sex sales, and that we also include sales that occur remotely on digital platforms such as OnlyFans,” said Teresa Carvalho, a member of the liberal Social Democratic Party. She explained the law aimed to shield “young people and children that you need to protect. We know that there is a dark picture behind [OnlyFans performances that involves] drugs, human trafficking and abuse, as well as being a gateway to more prostitution.” OnlyFans exploitation “serves as a gateway for young girls from the digital world to physical prostitution,” added Nina Larsson, the Minister for Gender Equality and a member of the more centrist Swedish Liberal People’s Party.

The law criminalizes only paying for personalized interactions, not subscribing to prerecorded pornographic content. But even such a limited protection would eliminate the majority of the pornographic website’s cash flow. Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans, told The Wall Street Journal last December that pay-per-view messages make up 59% of the platform’s total revenue, while OnlyFans derives 41% from subscription fees.

“We commend Sweden for making a concerted effort to confront sex trafficking and prostitution that happens online. By banning the purchase of commercial sex online, particularly at sites like OnlyFans, Sweden is working to end the demand for prostituted persons,” Dr. Marcel van der Watt, president of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), told The Washington Stand. “Without ‘buyers,’ the market forces that enable pimps and traffickers would collapse. Without ‘buyers,’ sexual exploitation would end.”

International authorities also welcomed the new Swedish law. “As I recommended in my report on prostitution and [violence against women and girls], States must adopt a standard approach to online and off- line prostitution,” said Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls (who also warned the World Health Organization against populating an “expert” panel on transgender guidelines with radical LGBT activists). “Sweden just did!”

Strong evidence ties online sexual performance with real-life prostitution. A 2022 survey of hundreds of explicit video content creators conducted by Sex Work CEO found that 72% of sexual content creators choose OnlyFans as the platform to sell their work. Also, 22% of online creators admit to engaging in “some form of in-person [sex] work,” and about three-quarters of creators use their platform to lobby for “sex worker issues.”

OnlyFans Profited from Sexual Trafficking Thanks to ‘Plausible Deniability’: Insider

This is far from the platform’s first brush with justice. The news service Reuters detailed 128 complaints from adults — including a rape victim — who had sexual content plastered on OnlyFans without consent. “OnlyFans has faced scrutiny by police, policymakers, and the press for evidence of child sexual abuse material, sex trafficking, image-based sexual abuse, and other forms of exploitation and potential crimes,” van der Watt told TWS. NCOSE named OnlyFans to its 2024 Dirty Dozen list.

Online influencer Andrew Tate has said he sexually groomed dozens of women into performing on OnlyFans. Tate boasted in 2022 that he made $600,000 a year from 75 women who did webcam shows on OnlyFans accounts he controlled. “My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she’s quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she’d do anything I say, and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together,” said Tate, according to screenshots now deleted from his website. Tate, who converted to Islam in 2022, has also praised other forms of Islamist persecution and exploitation of non-Muslims, saying, “ISIS are the real Muslims, because ISIS do exactly what the book says: Kill everyone who’s not a Muslim, and chop people’s heads off, and set them on fire, and be f****** raging lunatics.”

The women exploited are often the most vulnerable, reliving childhood sexual trauma or trying to find a sense of self-worth in a constantly online age. “Participants explained that pornographers are aware that young women are more vulnerable and thus easier to groom, recruit, control, and exploit, and are also in higher demand, translating into larger profits for pornographers,” wrote researcher Meghan Donevan. Some 44% of participants said they have been sexually abused as a child or young adult. Her 2021 study found that Swedish women involved in pornography “identified young age, financial insecurity, earlier exposure to sexualized violence, and poor mental health as typical antecedents to entering the pornography industry.” The participants found the porn industry leaves them feeling even more degraded. “In this industry, you’re no longer human. You are just an object that can be bought for money and the man can do what he wants with you,” one of the creators told Donevan.

NCOSE called on the Justice Department to investigate the platform over this revelation last March, but the Biden-Harris administration took no action.

OnlyFans and other porn websites shield themselves under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says, as a platform, they cannot be prosecuted for videos created by others.

“The key to success was plausible deniability,” a source inside OnlyFans told the New York Post.

Violent Stalkers Threaten to Rape, Dismember OnlyFans Personalities

Many of the people who request personalized acts or send personal messages to OnlyFans creators have proven to be mentally unstable. OnlyFans creator Ashly Schwan revealed in 2022 that a crazed stalker sent her a picture of himself holding a knife in her backyard. I had to move!” she told Barstool Sports broadcast, on OnlyFans. “I’ve had to move like twice since then.”

The same month a U.K.-based OnlyFans creator named Miki-rose, then 22, disclosed that she had experienced numerous threats to kidnap, rape, and dismember her. “Kent Police revealed in the first 11 months of this year, there have been 35 reports where ‘OnlyFans’ has been included in the enquiry log. Among these, there have been six reports of stalking, four reports of harassment, three reports of sending letters etc with intent to cause distress or anxiety, and two of blackmail,” reported local media.

“The site [OnlyFans] unfortunately has absolutely no safeguarding in place for when things like this happen,” said Miki-rose. “They barely reply to technical support emails.”

In 2022, Wisconsin police arrested a 45-year-old former high school swim coach who drove more than 400 miles to stalk an unnamed female OnlyFans creator whom he had been interacting with online. He followed her to a baseball game and paid a boy to hand deliver a note to her containing $200. He later sent her pictures of her apartment and from the baseball game with the menacing message, “I was ten feet away from you.” He later said he watched her have sex with her boyfriend through her apartment window and accused her of cheating on him.

OnlyFans “is also capable of doing so much for creators,” Blair told the Financial Times last February.

Yet its performers’ cries of danger have lifted OnlyFans to new financial heights.

OnlyFans: From a Music Platform to a Billion-Dollar Porn Business

OnlyFans has come a long way from its founding in 2016 by the father-son team of Guy and Tim Stokely as a platform to feature musicians and online influencers. In 2018, the Stokelys sold OnlyFans to Leonid Radvinsky, who had a shady reputation for running pornographic websites often from his home in Ukraine. Radvinsky focused the site primarily on porn. OnlyFans reported revenue last year of $1.3 billion from more than 300 million users. The platform takes one of every five dollars fans send to creators.

OnlyFans prefers not to call itself a pornographic website, Blair told FT, because “[t]he word ‘porn’ has been wrapped up in some of the negative things that were the case for the adult-content industry, and we’ve done an awful lot to try and help adult-content creators to have a safe space on the internet and be treated with respect.”

Radvinsky reportedly seeks to sell the platform but has had difficulty finding a buyer, because though he is “trying to sell it as not an adult content company but just a platform like X that allows adult content,” a company spokesperson told the New York Post, “most people right now view OnlyFans as an adult content company.” Similarly, Pornhub lingered on the market three years before its last sale.

The Swedish law will likely drive down the selling price. An OnlyFans representative greeted the law’s passage only by saying the company “complies with all laws and regulations in the jurisdictions in which it operates.”

The Echoes of a Christian Culture in Secular Sweden

Perhaps surprisingly, the law was first proposed by the Social Democrats — a member of the Party of European Socialists, which traces its origins to the Socialist International — before the nation’s center-Right government took power in 2022. Its nuanced approach to selling sex reveals the divided heart of post-Christian Sweden, said one expert. “On one hand, we have the most secular-individualistic values in the world, with the autonomy of the individual being viewed as the prime goal and purpose of our culture. This has resulted in a very liberal and individualized view on family relations and sexuality,” Per Ewert, Ph.D. in political history and the director at the Clapham Institute, a Christian think tank based in Sweden, told TWS. “At the same time, we see a backlash against this ultra-progressive view, especially on the area of trans and gender dysphoria. This reaction comes first in the medical field, but slower in politics.”

“One political area where Sweden has actually taken a moral stand is prostitution. In 1999, Sweden became the first nation in the world to prohibit buying sexual services ‘without punishing the seller,’ a law which has gained wide political acceptance in Sweden. The new law is another step in the same direction, and functions as a moral statement from the government, condemning purchases of sexual actions, even if it happens online,” Ewert added. Although the law may be “difficult to follow up in practice,” it remains “a valuable moral signal in a nation where the lack of sexual ethics has for many years been the norm.”

NCOSE has previously praised Sweden’s model as effective, especially when compared with Germany or the Netherlands.

Earlier this month, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA), which would effectively ban pornography in the United States.

Sweden is also looking at making its laws more protective. Annika Strandhäll, a Social Democratic member of the Riksdag, would like the Nordic nation to institute age-verification laws, which require a user to provide identification proving he is of legal age before he can view pornography. “We protect our children in many different ways from accessing different parts that are not suitable in our society. For example, if you go to a gaming site, or from having access to alcohol or the like,” said Strandhäll last month. “We see a major problem with the access to serious violence pornography that very young children in Sweden today have, just by the push of a button on their phones.”