The last TikTok Hardesty Ally On her page, there was a video of her and her friend dancing to KaMillion's remix of "Twerk For Me." Although she is a sex worker who posts NSFW content on her OnlyFans, a subscription-based platform that allows influencers to monetize personal interactions with fans, she was sure to keep the video PG, dressing in her videos only in sweats or pajamas. “I'm always very intentional about keeping lingerie or little outfits or anything I wear on separate from TikTok ”, she told me. “I just loved dancing with my friends and stuff. »
About a month later, she logged into her account to find that it had been completely deleted without warning. Hardesty was shocked: she had just reached 40 subscribers and none of her videos had been permanently removed from the platform before, which is notoriously strict about enforcing its guidelines against nudity and content sexual. (A video of her dancing in pajamas had been taken down, but she successfully appealed.) Sending an email to TikTok did not elucidate the question. “They didn’t give much explanation. They just said I couldn’t get my account back because I had violated the terms,” she says.
When she asked them which directive she had broken, TikTok said it was their policy prohibiting nudity and sexual activity – even though she had neither appeared nude nor referenced sexual activity on her account. “I had spent the last year building this account and learning the dances and all that,” she says. Being removed “was really disheartening.”
Hardesty was kicked out of TikTok in November, during part of what sex worker Rebekka Blue later called the “purge TikTok», a massive cleaning of their accounts from the platform. Rolling stone spoke to a half-dozen people who said they were expelled en masse in mid-November, all for the same reason: violating state policy. TikTok regarding sex and nudity. All declared that they had not violated the policy of TikTok, but that they had established a link to their OnlyFans or their websites linking to their OnlyFans in their bios, which they claim led to them being removed from the platform.
The purge appears to have been ahead of the new community of TikTok guidelines, who were recently updated and expanded. According to the new guidelines, users are prohibited from posting, broadcasting or sharing nude or sexually explicit content as well as “content that represents, promotes or glorifies sexual solicitation, including the offer of or request from sexual partners, discussions or images of a sexual nature, services, premium sexual content or sexcamming. These guidelines, for what they are worth, fall under the Category “sexual exploitation”, whether any of the above activities are consensual or not.
A representative of TikTok confirmed that “we do not allow content that commits, promotes or glorifies sexual solicitation or allows accounts that attempt to redirect traffic,” including to OnlyFans. (It hasn't explained why it allows links to, say, Twitter or YouTube, which are featured on influencer pages like TikTok by Tana Mongeau and Jordyn Woods and would also be considered an “attempt to redirect traffic.”) But not everyone. who has a OnlyFans uses it to post sexual content, and most creators Rolling stone spoke with said they didn't even directly link to their OnlyFans in their bios, instead of posting their Linktree, a third-party app that allows creators to post links to all of their social platforms. Additionally, many mainstream creators on TikTok publish links to their OnlyFans in their bios, including Bella Thorne, who caused a huge uproar when she joined the platform last fall and was accused of misleading clients and adding to the stigma of working women of sex.
TikTok declined to comment on why sex workers Rolling stone we spoke with have been removed from the app, and would provide no commentary on why Bella Thorne is allowed to post a link to her OnlyFans in his bio, while other content creators are not. But TikTok confirmed that users are prohibited from posting even third-party links to their OnlyFans – even if their guidelines do not say so explicitly, and even if OnlyFans of the user is not used to post sexually explicit content.
It is well known on the platform that TikTok, which has a large user base under the age of 18, will remove videos containing references to sex work or OnlyFans, which will lead creators to find clever ways to circumvent their content moderation policies. (" An accountant " TikTok, or sex workers sardonically claiming they are “accountants” while showing their income OnlyFans, is a great example.) Amberly Rothfield, adult content creator and adult marketing educator, said that following the Purge of TikTok, it becomes common knowledge that TikTok is “very anti-adult” and that the platform will delete your account if adult sites link to your bio, even through third-party apps like Linktree. “They are really going HAM by not allowing mention ofOnlyFans ", she says.
Lydia Love, who was also removed from TikTok on November 18, said she “was super careful” to avoid censorship of TikTok. “I wouldn't even type the word 'sugar daddy', I would type 'sugar daddy' and stuff like that lol. And I never used the word OnlyFans on my page. She did, however, have a Linktree in her bio, which contained a link to her OnlyFans. At the time it was taken down, it had almost 100 subscribers. “TONS of girls I know have been deleted. It was like a huge sweep with no explanation,” she says.
Goddess Ambrosia, a financial dominatrix, was another content creator whose account was deleted without warning or explanation three weeks ago. She had 185 subscribers at the time. “I mainly used [TikTok] to educate the public about sex work with the goal of destigmatizing the industry, as well as giving advice to new sex workers and posting my own variations of trends happening on the app,” she says via Twitter DM. Her account was deleted for "multiple violations of community guidelines," although she says that TikTok rarely deleted his videos from the app. She also had a link to her OnlyFans in his biography and is already feeling the effects of TikTok removing it from the application. “The way the algorithm works has really helped push my content to the right demographics and gained many new customers and subscribers OnlyFans ", she says. Since her account was deleted, she estimates she's lost around 100 followers. OnlyFans.
This is despite the fact that many of the biggest creators on TikTok, such as Rebekka Blue, a content creator on OnlyFans which has been permanently deleted from TikTok, has gathered hundreds of thousands, even millions of subscribers on the platform. At the time of her removal, Blue had also been approved as the creator of TikTok, allowing it to monetize its content. “I post without makeup and without loose clothing. I don’t show skin because I don’t want to risk my account being deleted,” she says Rolling stone. Regardless, her account was deleted at 950 followers until, with the help of a lawyer, she appealed to TikTok to get it back. She believes her large following, combined with the fact that she was a verified creator, helped her successfully get her account back on the platform.
Like other models Rolling stone spoke with, Blue linked to her OnlyFans on his profile, and had gone from making $2 a month to $000 a month just by promoting his account on TikTok. This is a fairly common tactic for promoting your account OnlyFans on TikTok, says Hardesty, even if you don't directly reference it in your videos. “Even if you don't promote yourself directly, if people see you on TikTok and see oh she's cute, she has a nice body, or even just for your personality or whatever, naturally they might go to your Instagram and over time – several levels of exposure – they find out that you have a OnlyFans and they might want to subscribe,” she says.
Blue also thinks that TikTok deleted it because she was using it to promote her OnlyFans. She considers this to be a serious double standard on the part of TikTok that they are so quick to remove sex workers for their legal activities on other platforms. “The problem is that on TikTok, you see so many of these girls under 18 with little to no clothes but because they don't make money on their links OnlyFans, their content stays in place,” she says. She is also quick to point out that other verified users of TikTok with even more followers linked to OnlyFans in their bios and have not been deleted from the platform.
Sex workers on the app fear that the platform's censorship may bode well for them in the future, especially in the context of other platforms like Instagram suppress even the faintest murmurs of positive sexual content. Having been misrepresented on other previously sex-positivity-friendly apps like Tumblr, sex workers fear that mass removals of TikTok be a sign of a future in which the platform is also hostile to them. “It’s really disheartening that TikTok can simply delete our accounts without warning because of what we do on another unrelated site TikTok ", says Hardesty.
