Billionaire Adult Broadcast Industry Fueled by Appalling Labor Abuse

“When we talked to the workers, they wanted to go back to the old ways, how the owner of the studio charges them for toilet paper or makes them work when they are on their period. I couldn’t get people to talk to me about the platforms, and that’s totally okay because you’re mad at a guy you know,” Killbride tells WIRED. “But there is another layer that is left completely invisible. This is a multi-billion dollar industry that has managed to escape criticism.”

WIRED reached out to BongaCams, Chaturbate, LiveJasmin, and Stripchat for comment on the survey results. No one answered.

The HRW report outlines key recommendations to improve conditions at both the studio and stage levels. This includes occupational safety standards in the studios used for regular inspections. Models should be able to take breaks and receive a small salary for their work, studio managers should not force models to perform certain sexual acts or agree to perform any act on behalf of models. Additionally, models must have access to a confidential reporting system so that they can notify law enforcement or other authorities about service violations.

Developing recommendations for the platforms themselves is even more complex. Killbride says most if not all popular adult streaming platforms have strict verification requirements for creating accounts and specifically prohibit studio owners or anyone else from accepting terms of service on someone else’s behalf. In fact, companies are not doing enough, HRW researchers say, to provide terms of service in a simple and understandable way in different languages, including Spanish.

Platforms also need to provide channels through which content creators can report violations and receive a timely response, the researchers said. And, most importantly, platforms should establish policies that allow models to take ownership and transfer their accounts to the studio. The researchers found that the current situation on many platforms includes policy language that may confuse their users or technical issues that keep content creators from being able to assert the ownership of their accounts.

Above all else, the stakes are very high in account ownership issues, because researchers found that studios often use “recycled” accounts – those that are verified and created by a single photographer and then maintained by the studio – to avoid minimum age requirements. and distribute material that sexually abuses children.

“We found that even though the platforms have strong and clear policies about not broadcasting to children, studios are still able to hire and broadcast children using fake identities or, more often, recycled accounts,” said Killbride. “Our research was limited to adults, but most of the people we spoke to started broadcasting as children between the ages of 13 and 17.”

Killbride emphasizes that this situation shows an important trend for representing sex workers and general labor reforms: Listening to workers about their needs and protection that will help them do their jobs effectively and equally and, at the same time, protect other vulnerable people. In this case, by allowing cameramen to control and forward their accounts and followers, the adult streaming industry could significantly reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material.