Sex sells? OnlyFans was yet another company to ban porn (even though briefly)
This article was originally written before OnlyFans’ decision to give up on baning sex and pornography from its website. However, I believe that the main argumentos on freedom of speech, sex as driver of innovation and the whole background to OnlyFan’s initial decision remain the same.
Sex has been a driver of innovation even before the invention of the internet, with the porn industry being quoted as the reason why VHS won the battle with Betamax during the 1970’s (which curiously led to a profound change in the porn industry itself which saw the end of its “golden age” around the same time), and also being in the frontier of internet cash transactions, VR, etc.
Besides being a business of astronomical values, 35% of all internet downloads are related to pornography that is accessed by billions of people on a daily basis — XVideos and PornHub are, respectively, the 9th and 10th most visited websites as of January 2021.
However big internet companies have increasingly distanced themselves from sex and pornography, adopting conservative and even retrograde positions, leading to situations that are frankly ridiculous such as the punishments given by Facebook to images that its artificial intelligence confuses with breasts or other parts of the human anatomy or even…
