OnlyFans Drifting towards Pornography: The Technological and Ethical Challenges of Open Platforms

OnlyFans, a paywalled platform primarily known for hosting adult content, had drifted towards sexually explicit content since COVID-19-related lockdowns began in March 2020. However, given pressure from its investors, in August 2021 OnlyFans announced it would ban sexually explicit content from its site later that year. Following the announcement, the company came under fierce criticism from its adult content creators, who maintained that OnlyFans owed its growth to pornography, an industry that had been evolving as technological advancements arose. On August 25, 2021, upon renegotiating with its capital providers, OnlyFans suspended the ban, though irreversible damage had been done. Considering the related information technology (IT) management and ethical issues, what should the chief executive officer of OnlyFans have done when OnlyFans’ different stakeholders pulled the platform in different directions and expressed opposing ethical views? How was an open platform like OnlyFans supposed to judge what was ethical and what was not? Was banning (or not banning) sexually explicit content ethical?

The case examines OnlyFans’ decision to ban sexually explicit content on its platform from both an IT management and business ethics perspective. It seeks to highlight IT concepts (network effects, platform drifting) and gives students an understanding of three schools of ethics (consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics). It is suitable for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on innovation management, business ethics, technology management, or IT management. The case has two main objectives. First, it highlights the complexities of managing open social media platforms amidst the possibility of drifting towards unintended, unwanted usage. Second, it underscores various ethical stands that every manager must consider in their decision-making to ensure they end up on the side of being good and just. After working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to do the following:<ul><li>Understand and analyze same-side and cross-side network effects in platform development.</li><li>Identify various factors (e.g., switching costs, multi-homing costs, demand for differentiation) and their respective importance to different groups of users within a platform.</li><li>Differentiate desirable platform drift from other types of drift.</li><li>Assess the sustainability of OnlyFans’ reliance on sexually explicit content for growth.</li><li>Evaluate the ethical aspects of OnlyFans’ business model through the lenses of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics.</li></ul>

• platform
• ethics
• drifting
• pornography
• moral responsibility