Minor Liability On Adult Content Hosting Platforms

I have been seeing a lot of misinformation (according to my research into federal laws and OnlyFans TOS) regarding who is liable in the instance that a minor sees your content on platform. The short of it: you.

Let quickly talk section 230 of the communications act of 1934. This was enacted as part of the communications decency act of 1996 and provides limited federal immunity to providers and users of interactive computer services (think social media, onlyfans, fansly etc). The statute generally protects providers and users from being held liable for information provided by a third party. But, that does not prevent them from being held legally responsible for their own information or activities.

To break this down more specifically let’s look at two provisions of section 230.

First would be section 230(c)(1) and it specifies that service providers may not be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another content provider. Then when we look at section 230(c)(2) we see that it states that service providers and users may not be held liable for voluntarily acting in good faith to restrict access to NSFW or obscene content.

So let’s chat about what that means for us and why we care about this section of the federal laws.

We’re going to use onlyfans as an example and we will be focusing in on section (c)(1). Looking at the language used in that we need to get some definitions out of the way. When this statute says “providers” It would be meaning the platforms that we use. So using in our example, onlyfans would be the provider. Users would be anyone on the platform. So that would be your subscribers, your fans, even you in certain circumstances (such as if you were interacting as a fan and not a creator). We, the content creators, would be considered the third party, content provider, and publisher.

Then Before we really dive into what this means for us let’s look at a quick snippet from only fans terms of use for fans, subsection 7:

“We will not be responsible to you if you suffer any loss or damage as a result of your accessing or viewing Content containing adult material in a way which places you in breach of any contract you have with a third party (for example, your employment contract) or in breach of any applicable law.”

So now let’s go ahead and put these two bits of information together.

Section 230 of the communications act of 1934 makes it to where providers, the platforms, are not going to be held liable for any damages or laws broken by the creators, the third party, on the platform. Then stated out in only fans terms of service, they double down on this and repeat that they will not be held liable. Why do we need to know this and when would this knowledge apply to us? Age verification. We have spoken in a previous resource the extent to which OnlyFans age verifies, so we know there are not extensive checks always done.

So what if a minor gets on the platform and then orders content, who is liable?

Well, according to this statute and onlyfans terms of service, you are. We as the creator are responsible if a minor sees our NSFW content even if we are on platform. The platform is not responsible. This goes for every single platform out there, whether it be your paid pages or socials. Age verification is a pain yes. And yes sometimes it does dead end a sale. But I just wanted to bring this to everyone’s attention that even if you are on a platform like fansly or only fans, you are still the one legally held responsible if a minor sees your content.

Huge huge disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I would be a terrible lawyer. I am just someone who makes content online full-time and who’s made a business out of it and ​has a passion with learning this industry and sharing everything I learn in it. I have no extensive legal background to speak of. please consult a lawyer with any concerns.