At least one bank appears to have changed course after OnlyFans went public about banks blocking payments.
OnlyFans has made a
sharp u-turn on its decision to ban sexually explicit content after it
received a backlash from creators and some new assurances from at least
one bank suffering bad PR.
The platform became wildly popular by
connecting online sex workers to subscribers, but this has not gone down
well with a number of major banks.
The firm was forced to change its policy on Aug. 19 to prohibit “sexually explicit conduct”
following pressure from the Bank of New York Mellon, Metro Bank, and
JPMorgan Chase, who refused to provide services to users of the
platform.
In a tweet on Aug. 25, OnlyFans stated that it has now
reversed this decision and it “will continue to provide a home for all
creators.”
An OnlyFans spokesperson told TechCrunch:
“The
proposed October 1, 2021 changes are no longer required due to banking
partners’ assurances that OnlyFans can support all genres of creators.”
However,
the official statement merely says it “suspended” the policy which
suggests the policy may be reintroduced at a later date if the
assurances aren't backed up in reality.
The decision to ban
sexually explicit content had frustrated sex workers who rely on the
platform to support themselves financially, especially during
pandemic-induced lockdowns. Following the decision, some creators had
already deleted their OnlyFans accounts and moved to alternate services.
At
the time of the initial announcement, founder and CEO of OnlyFans, Tim
Stokely, stated that the firm pays over one million creators more than
$300 million every month, adding “making sure that these funds get to
creators involves using the banking sector.”
Speaking to the
Financial Times this week, Stokely named JPMorgan in particular as being
“aggressive in closing accounts of sex workers”, or any business that
supports them. It appears that OnlyFans was able to find a resolution to
the issue with at least one bank after widespread publicity about the
matter.
OnlyFans was founded in 2016 and claims to have more than 130 million registered users and 2 million creators.
Related: Bitcoin Fixes This: PayPal Cuts Payouts to Over 100,000 Pornhub Models
In
2019, Pornhub faced similar problems when PayPal withdrew services from
the platform, preventing it from paying models. At the time, Pornhub
turned to privacy-focused cryptocurrency Verge (XVG). Visa and MasterCard followed suit in 2020 in shunning the world’s biggest porn site forcing further reliance on crypto.
source link : https://cointelegraph.com/news/onlyfans-reverses-decision-to-ban-porn-after-assurances-from-banking-partners
