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China Shuts Down OnlyFans, Calls It a Threat to National Morals and Social Order
(thedailyguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2025
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Seem to be mixed opinions of this here.
I'm of the opinion sex workers should not be criminals and need protections, but sex work should not be encouraged. A longterm goal of reducing it through improvement of the conditions and targeting causes is what I would prefer.
Balancing that is never going to be easy but seems right.
This is the most correct take in the thread tbh
It's just really difficult to say what's right to do with something like Only Fans. I think it makes getting into sex work far too easy and far too normalised, on top of creating a massive corporation that has a vested interest in normalising sex work in society and is actively using professional marketing and other methods to achieve that.
It seems heavy handed to shut down something so many sex workers obviously rely on but at the same time I can't see how you would handle it otherwise? Maybe a smoking approach would work? Rather than outright prohibition you could make laws banning the advertising of services related to sex work, banning branded advertising, banning visible brands, etc etc. Force it into the dark. Individual sex workers wouldn't be affected by this much but a large company built on sex work like Only Fans would be targetable. This would probably kill the business' ability to exist at all though so it's possibly the same thing as banning it but through a more detached method.
I think a huge problem is how it exists on social media in the most exploitative way possible, which has driven demand way up.
I literally cannot scroll Instagram without being shown onlyfans girls. The algorithm has sensed I am a young man, and as such I need BBL's on my feed. It's in short formats too, with optimised attention-catching editing/text/structure or whatever. It's insane that it exists on an app which so many children use, and it's insane that so much of it can be served up alongside normal content.
Yeah it is absolutely everywhere and in that regard I don't fault China's analysis that some have translated as saying it is a "disease".
It has contributed MASSIVELY to a rise in sex work in my opinion, but finding information on that is a mess because of the muddied terminology between compensated sex activities vs pornographic sex work. I think we can all at least agree an increase in sex work is not a good thing and aiming not to increase the population of sex workers who are in the massive majority women.
Yeah there's defo been an explosion of it, and i suppose it's better that the pornstars have more autonomy over their body/work than they would on porn sets of the past where the abuse is rampant, but at the same time it's sad how easy it is to just start posting on it and how normalised it's become.
I've known quite a few people to do it for some extra money - that they didn't even necessarily need - because they figured they're a sex positive person and don't mind doing the minimum level of taking nude pictures for money - but soon enough they realised that it can be a very degrading process, and you get all sorts of weird people from your past suddenly watching your 'content' and it doesn't feel good. And then it's out there online, and someone's got those pictures to do whatever they want with.
At the end of the day it's also still exploitative in a literal labour sense because Onlyfans takes a big cut.