TikTok Pushes Girls Toward OnlyFans, Campaigners Say

TikTok is quietly ushering teenage girls toward the sex trade, according to a year-long investigation from two campaigning groups. Researchers from Cease in the UK and Collective Shout in Australia say the app lets popular OnlyFans performers post non-explicit videos packed with coded hints that their pornographic material is for sale somewhere else. The report calls the phenomenon the “TikTok to OnlyFans pipeline.”

The playbook is deceptively wholesome. Performers film shopping trips, baking, pet clips and skincare routines under the “get ready with me” format, then slip in euphemisms, emojis and gestures that point followers to paid adult content. A common trick: swapping “porn” for “corn,” or pairing the corn emoji with a star. TikTok bans sexual solicitation and won’t let creators link to OnlyFans, yet the safe-for-work content those creators make keeps getting pushed out by the algorithm, the researchers found.

The sales pitch is money. Viral TikToks have featured creators flashing cash, mansions, private jets and luxury cars — one caption read “how it feels knowing I own all of this at 23 thanks to 250,000 men.” Others told rags-to-riches stories framing an OnlyFans account as the escape hatch from poverty and unemployment. OnlyFans’ own figures show its top 5,000 creators have each earned more than $1m since the site launched in 2016, while the average take for its 5 million registered performers sits at roughly $1,000 a year, according to the report.

Melinda Tankard Reist of Collective Shout didn’t mince words, calling TikTok “an industrial-scale digital pimp funnelling girls into the sex industry.” She said young women and girls deserve protection from “a predatory industry grooming them to be producers of explicit content.” The research was prompted by the huge teen-girl following of OnlyFans stars like Sophie Rain, who got famous filming inside Miami’s Bop House, and Ari Kytsya — who was named a L’Oréal brand ambassador for Urban Decay.

The authors want governments to widen the rules. They argue the ban many countries already have on showing explicit porn to under-18s should also cover posts that promote or relate to the sex industry, not just the X-rated material itself.

Both platforms pushed back. A TikTok spokesperson said the app “strictly prohibits the sharing or showing of sexual content” and uses advanced technology to enforce its guidelines, with systems built to keep age-inappropriate material away from teens. OnlyFans said it is strictly for adults and that it uses “strict onboarding processes to prevent minors accessing the platform.”