On Monday 18 October, Instagram started showing some users a popup message explaining that it will soon take away their ability to post links stickers, which many creators use to redirect their followers to other sites, digital stores and platforms where they can make money. “Instagram doesn’t allow adult content on its platform, but many adult content creators use it for promotional reasons, inviting their Instagram audience to follow them to other platforms or personal sites,” VICE noted.
“Starting on 25 October, you will no longer have access to the link sticker because you have shared content that violates our Community Guidelines,” the message says. Although Instagram claims users are adding links that do not comply with its Community Guidelines, many users who claim otherwise have no option to appeal this decision other than an “OK” button.
Link stickers are an option in Instagram’s ephemeral Stories feature where users can add an external link to their photo or video. In August 2021, Instagram removed the ability to link and send users off platform by swipe-ups and replaced it with a sticker, a small clickable icon that hovers over the image instead.
While many of the users who first started speaking out about this abrupt and inexplicable change were in the adult industry—sex workers are more often than not the first people to experience censorship and discrimination online—accounts that followed varied in what they post about. @Feminist, a popular Instagram account that has managed to build an impressive community of over 6.4 million users rooted in intersectional feminism, has also seen its link sticker get taken down.
Although Instagram has yet to confirm a specific reason behind this recent ‘punishment’, it’s been noted that most accounts known for sharing petitions, links to crowdfunding platforms, or even to external resources have been impacted by the move. In a way, this links back to the alleged—although less intense—problem the popular ‘link in bio’ service Linktree was once witnessing.
If you’ve got your link sticker taken away too, and aren’t even sure of why, here’s what an Instagram spokesperson told VICE in a statement: “As part of our efforts to limit the spread of harmful content that violates our Community Guidelines, we’ll restrict people who have repeatedly or severely violated these policies from using the link sticker. However, we’re investigating an issue where people may have mistakenly been notified that they will be restricted, and we’re working on resolving this as soon as possible.”
In other news, the platform has also announced the launch of a new co-authoring feature called Collabs. “Now, instead of tagging your friend on a picture they helped shoot, you can invite them to be a collaborator and their username will appear in the post header alongside yours,” wrote Input Mag. The feature also applies to Reels. This addition could help people grow their audiences by piggybacking off more popular friends who might add them as a collaborator. Besides including a collaborator’s handle in the header, the post will also be shared across both users’ feeds and follower timelines. Both users will be able to monitor views, likes and comments in their notifications.
So, let us get this straight… Instagram still can’t be bothered to do something about the innumerable bigoted and harmful posts on its platform but it has time for a co-authoring feature and a half-assed algorithm that, in the end, penalises small content creators and sex workers? Sounds about right.
Towards the end of August 2021, OnlyFans, the online platform that built its $60 million net worth off the back of sex workers, stated it would be closing its doors to them. This new update of its policy would “prohibit the posting of any new content containing sexually explicit conduct,” dealing a massive blow to the incomes of many who relied on the platform. However, due to great uproar from the sex worker community, the company quickly backtracked on its decision.
The breaking of this news—coupled with the community’s justified anger and retraction that followed—all happened in the mere frame of five days. The media took OnlyFans’ change of mind as the end of the discussion, unsurprisingly giving the million-dollar company the final say. Few stopped to ask the sex workers impacted by this policy change about how this may affect their financial and mental state, or their residual feelings about the platform. So this is the opportunity to hear directly from sex workers on their reactions’ to OnlyFans, how safe and supportive the site actually is and the constant battle they have to fight for their right to even exist on digital platforms.
Having heard rumblings of the proposed changes for months, the initial announcement about the update did not shock most creators. OnlyFans’ dismissal of sex workers, who had made the site what it was, demonstrated a clear lack of respect for their work. In my chat with Em Rose, a rope enthusiast who has been creating content on OnlyFans since January and became an online acquaintance who gave me useful resources for shibari how-tos in the dull months of winter lockdown, explained how she is tragically used to such treatment, having “regularly been disregarded and treated unfairly.”
The threat—although never actually put into action—still damaged the income of many of its creators. Like any threat of redundancy would, many were left feeling insecure and anxious about their pages. OnlyFans creator Babyspice confessed that the change affected her ability to create content altogether. Having felt “very ill and anxious for a month,” it is only recently that she has been feeling better and therefore able to create content again.
As OnlyFans retracted its user agreement, we will never be able to see how fairly this prohibition would have been implemented. But Em Rose pointed out the presence of an uneven distribution when implementing policies like these. “Explicit is such a subjective term [furthering] the racism, classism, and fatphobia that intersect with whorephobia,” Em Rose said. Other social media platforms have already demonstrated such discriminatory behaviours towards sex workers; Twitter purges for NSFW (not safe for work) accounts are becoming a regular practice and it is not uncommon to see warning tweets by fellow sex workers, advising users to change their profile pictures and remove links from their bios to avoid being banned from the platform.
Many content creators never found OnlyFans to be that helpful for its creators in the first place. This is because the platform is not set up to encourage organic reach, as Iska Hendricks self-titled ‘circus freak’ and online sex worker told Screen Shot. OnlyFans does not advertise its creators and as Hendricks puts it, “You can’t search for creators that you like.” Therefore, even with an account, promotion on other social media platforms is still necessary to grow and maintain subscriptions. The only way to gain subscribers, due to OnlyFans lack of organic reach, is to link your page on social media platforms—which in itself makes you vulnerable to bans, shadow bans and unwanted exposure.
Some creators have even been banned from OnlyFans on the basis of use violations. Vague terms of use allow the platform to remove content as and when it feels like. Em Rose also highlighted how the site once “called [her content] ‘obscene’ without [ever] clarifying what that means.” She believes that OnlyFans routinely sides with clients rather than sex workers.
Em Rose’s suspicions are not misplaced, from other accounts it’s made clear that OnlyFans’ policies favour the fan and not the creator. For example, its terms of use allow subscribers to request chargebacks from their bank for content they have already paid for, meaning they can use the content and then get a refund. So, creators will often spend a lot of time creating custom content only to have the payment back charged to the subscriber—an exploitative exchange.“Someone has seen your body for free,” Hendricks added, describing the experience as “utterly violating.”
OnlyFans now claim it is “committed to providing a safe and dependable platform for all creators and their fans.” But many of its creators, having been burned once already, are cautious of this promise.
Like many others, Hendricks is one sex worker who is still planning to switch over to Fansly, a competing site that offers organic reach and gives more profits back to its creators—partly because she wants to give OnlyFans “the middle finger considering how they treated us” and refuses to be burned twice. “If you look into the terms of conditions, they say they have the right to do it again but give us no warning next time.”
It is clear from the multitude of problems creators faced even before the policy change that OnlyFans may have profited off the sex workers that made its platform so popular, but has no plans to protect them.
Sex workers use Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and TikTok to promote their content, even though they constantly hit roadblocks on these sites. A clear sign that a sex worker has already been scarred by a ban on such platforms is the existence of a second account in their bio, as if to show they’re already prepared for the inevitable.
Shadowbanning has become a regular occurrence for many sex workers on Instagram and Twitter. In such instances, the platform won’t even notify the account’s owner that they are under a shadowban, but the posts will not be visible to any who follow, or to anyone who doesn’t follow and tries to search for them. Although with an entire ban the person must create an entirely new account, the shadowban takes more of a toll on the creator’s time and mental energy. Because the whole point of a shadowban is for creators to be unaware of it.
Creators can spend days posting before becoming aware that their account has been targeted by Instagram’s algorithm. Hendricks explained how this eventually started affecting her self image, leading her into questioning her worth while trying to remind herself of the fact that “social media just hates sex workers.” It’s been highlighted before that while the algorithm is supposed to be impartial and exists to catch potentially triggering content, this punishment targets creative and queer-leaning accounts more often than racist or homophobic ones.
Bans and shadowbans don’t just affect a sex worker’s ability to advertise themselves and their working mentality, for some it also has an effect on their personal life. Em Rose shared that although she was not using Tinder for her work, she was banned from the dating app. Stating this had a “significant impact on my life, as a poly sex worker living through a pandemic, [making] it way harder to meet people.”
OnlyFans recent news may have clouded the headlines but it’s abundantly clear that its policy change is not the only fight sex workers have to face on online platforms. Back charges, shadowbans and bans in general have a large impact on not just sex workers’ mental health but also their income on a regular basis—making digital sex work an uphill battle against the social media platforms and businesses that profit off their existence and the traffic they bring to these sites.
When visiting platforms like OnlyFans as a potential subscriber, it is important to familiarise yourself with the site’s terms of use. For example, don’t message asking for meetups on a creator’s OnlyFans page. This behaviour could be seen as a violation and get them suspended or even removed from the site.
To help fight the digital eradication of sex workers on social media platforms, we can all actively interact with their accounts. Em Rose, in this case, advised supporters to follow creators to whatever platforms they choose to use. And most importantly, to remember that “sex workers are people too! Websites like these already treat us as a disposable money-making tool.” So always be respectful to the creators you are interacting with.