OnlyFans in ‘groundbreaking’ partnership with Internet Watch Foundation

OnlyFans has entered a “groundbreaking” new partnership with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) which will help “light the way” to keeping the internet free of criminal imagery.

Today (October 4) the IWF is announcing it will work with the content subscription platform to share expertise in support of IWF’s mission and to enhance user safety on OnlyFans.

IWF will provide OnlyFans with services, including the URL, NPI and Hash lists. This will help support their efforts to safeguard against any criminal imagery being shared on their platform.

OnlyFans will provide IWF with technical and engineering support and contribute to the development of a model of good practice. The model of good practice will set out how online platforms hosting sexually explicit user-generated consensual adult content, can help in the IWF’s mission to block, disrupt, and remove CSAM from the internet.

OnlyFans is an 18s and over subscription based content platform, which uses age verification and age estimation to ensure that all users are over 18. It has no end-to-end encryption and uses a combination of state-of-art technology and human content moderators to review all images, videos, audio files and direct messages uploaded to the platform. These measures have made OnlyFans an industry leader in online safety.

The partnership comes as the IWF reports 2022 was a record-breaking year in the fight against the proliferation of CSAM online. The IWF, which is responsible for finding, disrupting, and taking down CSAM from the internet, is seeing more abuse online than ever before.

The abuse being shared by criminals online is also getting more severe, with the number of URLs containing the most extreme, Category A, having doubled since 2020.

Susie Hargreaves OBE, Chief Executive of the Internet Watch Foundation, said: “With this groundbreaking work, we hope to help light the way forward for working collaboratively towards keeping the internet free of CSAM.

“The scale of the problem we are seeing online, as well as the severity of the abuse we are seeing, means this is something we can only tackle with strong partnerships and vital allies across the web.

“By working with OnlyFans, we can benefit from each other’s skills and expertise and ensure a united front against illegal and harmful online materials.”

Keily Blair, Chief Executive of OnlyFans said: “At OnlyFans we believe that all online platforms have a duty to protect children online. That is why we are proud to work with the Internet Watch Foundation to share our expertise and technology in this area.

“Only when all parts of the industry – including digital media platforms, NGOs and law enforcement – work together, will we be successful in our mission to protect children from online harm.”