Tag: porn

Sweden Cracks Down On OnlyFans – Will U.S. Follow Suit?

The X-rated social media platform OnlyFans is experiencing real growth, with revenue, content, and user numbers all on the rise. The site’s over 4 million “creators” sell content – including images, videos, and personalized chats – to more than 300 million subscribers, or “fans.” It’s primarily a sex site, and claims that the platform isn’t powered by porn are usually accompanied by winks and nods to the contrary.

OnlyFans keeps a 20% cut of what users pay, boasting $1.3 billion of revenue in 2023. It’s a lucrative approach to monetizing porn consumption, but the platform just hit a legal roadblock in a seemingly unlikely country.

Sweden, which in 1971 became the second country in the world to formally legalize all forms of pornography, has not been as soft on prostitution. In 1999, the country criminalized the purchase of sex, but not the sale, in efforts to protect vulnerable women from facing stiff legal consequences.

That policy will now apply to the virtual world. As of July 1, Swedes could face up to a year in prison for paying someone for personalized online sexual services, including sexting and video content. The new law also criminalizes promoting or profiting from others who perform sex acts for payment on demand, forcing OnlyFans to pull out of Sweden.

In a country known for libertines more than prudes, the law passed with broad, cross-party support. “The idea is that anyone who buys sexual acts performed remotely should be penalized in the same way as those who buy sexual acts involving physical contact,” said Gunnar Strommer, Sweden’s Justice Minister and a member of the Moderate party.

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Zelensky considers legalizing porn production

A petition demanding the legalization of pornography production in Ukraine has been forwarded to the country’s parliament for review, Vladimir Zelensky announced on Tuesday. The statement was published on his website after the initiative got more than 25,000 signatures, meeting the legal threshold that requires formal consideration.

The petition, authored by Ukrainian OnlyFans model Svetlana Dvornikova, calls for the decriminalization of adult content production, arguing that law enforcement resources should be directed toward investigating serious crimes rather than conducting “controlled purchases of intimate photos.” It requests legislative changes which would stop police from pursuing the individuals involved.

Pornography was banned in Ukraine in 2009, when then-President Viktor Yushchenko signed legislation that outlawed the possession, distribution, sale, and manufacture of such materials. 

Dvornikova’s petition, submitted on June 27, 2025, has quickly gained support. By early July, it had reached the required number of signatures, prompting Zelensky’s response.

In June, Dvornikova publicly urged Zelensky to support legalization. She claimed that her content had generated significant tax revenue for the state, yet she had faced two criminal cases — one for alleged tax evasion and another for the production of pornography. 

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France Pushes Digital ID Check Laws For Platforms Like Reddit and Bluesky

Efforts by the French government to combat online access to pornography are quickly turning into a broader push to dismantle online anonymity, raising significant alarm among privacy advocates.

Authorities are now considering applying harsh age-verification mandates not just to explicit sites, but also to social networks like Reddit, Mastodon, and Bluesky, platforms where adult content may appear but where identity is not typically tethered to real-world credentials.

The shift doesn’t involve new legislation, but a reinterpretation of existing laws under France’s recently enacted regulations. This would allow the state to brand platforms that “enable the sharing of pornographic content” as porn sites, subjecting them to some of the most invasive digital ID checks yet proposed in the EU.

Digital Minister Clara Chappaz’s office stated, “Our focus is age verification for any platform that distributes or enables the sharing of pornographic content.”

Though framed as a move to protect children, the implications extend well beyond youth safety. Any service caught in this net would be forced to track the age, and by extension, the identity, of its users, undermining pseudonymity and threatening to make anonymous online activity impossible in practice.

The government’s renewed urgency follows the tragic killing of a teaching assistant in a high school, which President Emmanuel Macron used to reemphasize his call to ban social media for users under 15. While unrelated to pornography, the incident is being used to justify sweeping controls over digital spaces.

Platforms that fail to comply with the new age-check rules risk being fined, blacklisted by search engines, or even blocked entirely. Chappaz recently signaled that Elon Musk’s X is close to being designated as a pornographic platform, despite its primary function as a text-based social media site, highlighting how blurry and expansive the government’s definitions have become.

However, the legal path is anything but clear. Under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), decisions over “Very Large Online Platforms” rest with the European Commission, not individual member states.

These platforms are expected to assess and mitigate risks, including those tied to adult content, but retain discretion on how to do so. A legal review in France is reportedly underway, signaling the state’s intent to push this policy despite potential conflicts with EU law.

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France considers requiring Musk’s X to verify users’ age

The French government is considering designating X as a porn platform — a move that will likely have the platform implementing strict age verification requirements.

Such a designation could effectively ban children from accessing the social media app unless it curtailed adult content. Paris has recently upped its efforts to protect kids online by requiring age verification by porn platforms.

“X has indicated since 2024 that it accepts the distribution of pornographic content. It must therefore be treated as such,” Digital Minister Clara Chappaz’s office told POLITICO.

Her team has been tasked with “examining the designation of X in the decree concerning pornographic sites that must verify the age of their users.”

The confirmation follows an appearance by Chappaz on French TV show “Quotidien” on Thursday evening, where she said X will soon receive “the same pretty papers as YouPorn” instructing X to ban adult content or implement age screening.

Porn platforms serving content in France are required to implement age verification measures with a final deadline of June 7, although some are protesting.

Failure to comply could see sites fined, delisted from search engines or blocked completely.

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Southern Baptists target porn, sports betting, same-sex marriage and ‘willful childlessness’

Southern Baptists meeting this week in Dallas will be asked to approve resolutions calling for a legal ban on pornography and a reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court’s approval of same-sex marriage.

The proposed resolutions call for laws on gender, marriage and family based on what they say is the biblically stated order of divine creation. They also call for legislators to curtail sports betting and to support policies that promote childbearing.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, is also expected to debate controversies within its own house during its annual meeting Tuesday and Wednesday — such as a proposed ban on churches with women pastors. There are also calls to defund the organization’s public policy arm, whose anti-abortion stance hasn’t extended to supporting criminal charges for women having abortions.

In a denomination where support for President Donald Trump is strong, there is little on the advance agenda referencing specific actions by Trump since taking office in January in areas such as tariffs, immigration or the pending budget bill containing cuts in taxes, food aid and Medicaid.

Remnants of the epic showdown in Dallas 40 years ago

Southern Baptists will be meeting on the 40th anniversary of another Dallas annual meeting. An epic showdown took place when a record-shattering 45,000 church representatives clashed in what became a decisive blow in the takeover of the convention — and its seminaries and other agencies — by a more conservative faction that was also aligned with the growing Christian conservative movement in presidential politics.

The 1985 showdown was “the hinge convention in terms of the old and the new in the SBC,” said Albert Mohler, who became a key agent in the denomination’s rightward shift as longtime president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Attendance this week will likely be a fraction of 1985’s, but that meeting’s influence will be evident. Any debates will be among solidly conservative members.

Many of the proposed resolutions — on gambling, pornography, sex, gender and marriage — reflect long-standing positions of the convention, though they are especially pointed in their demands on the wider political world. They are proposed by the official Committee on Resolutions, whose recommendations typically get strong support.

A proposed resolution says legislators have a duty to “pass laws that reflect the truth of creation and natural law — about marriage, sex, human life, and family” and to oppose laws contradicting “what God has made plain through nature and Scripture.”

To some outside observers, such language is theocratic.

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New UN Treaty Allows for Virtual Child P*rn

A new UN treaty to combat cybercrimes would allow predators and tech giants to profit from the sexual exploitation of children, including through images created using AI.

These new threats are emerging while the United Nations launches a new treaty to address cybercrime, but the new treaty only addresses some of the threats from sexual exploitation.

While the new treaty calls for criminalizing non-consensual sharing of intimate pictures, it still allows for a broad swath of sexualized content involving children. For instance, while the treaty criminalizes what is newly called “child sexual abuse material,” this term refers narrowly to images of real children. The new term allows for child porn created through Artificial Intelligence. As is now widely known, AI images are shockingly real.

Such images, soon to be allowed by UN treaty, would still be in violation of U.S. federal law. Specifically, in several sections, the new UN treaty allows countries to de-criminalize virtual child pornography in all circumstances as well as private sexting by minors, even to adults.

The General Assembly adopted the treaty on December 24, 2024.  Now countries must sign and ratify it before it goes into force. A signing ceremony for the new treaty will take place at a Summit in July in Hanoi. The treaty will enter into force after forty countries ratify it.

Supporters of the treaty argue that legalizing sexting is compassionate because adolescents have a right to sexual expression. Some argue that letting pedophiles satisfy their sexual preferences with virtual material would make it less likely that they would prey on real children. And they say that dropping the term “child pornography” is necessary to avoid re-victimizing those who have been exploited. They call all this part of a “trauma-informed” and “harm-reduction” approach, based on new theories in behavioral therapy.

Regardless of the merits of such arguments, they would appear to conflict with the priority of law enforcement of preventing abusers from harming future victims. There is no evidence that such new approaches make law enforcement more effective. Until recently, U.S. Justice Department experts argued against it.

Moreover, there is evidence that allowing sexual predators to engage with virtual pornography leads to more child sexual abuse, not less. And anti-trafficking advocates are all too familiar with how underage girls are lured into pornography and eventually the sex industry through sexting.

A recent investigation of the Wall Street Journal uncovered how Meta chat bots pose a danger to children and how executives at the company deliberately allowed the chat bots to engage children sexually and to pose as children willing to engage in sexual acts. The investigation found that sexual predators and tech giants have a common interest in ensuring that children can be sexualized online.

Meta programmers were being pushed by the Meta executive suite not to impose excessive limits on sexual content, including involving children as users and objects, because of the high engagement it generates and the profits this would generate. As a result, existing firewalls to protect children were ineffective by design. Chat bots lured children into sexual conversations that eventually lead to progressively more explicit and degrading sexual content. And chat bots also posed as children who are willing to entertain lewd and even violent sexual behavior from their adult and child users.

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Beloved gay porn star, Colton Ford, found dead at 62 after mysterious hiking accident

A beloved gay porn star, Glenn Soukesian, better known as Colton Ford, was found dead in a mysterious hiking accident outside Palm Springs, California, authorities confirmed.

Ford, 62, was found dead Monday night on the Goat Trails in the California desert oasis, according to the Bay Area Reporter.

Police found his remains on Monday after his friends had reported him missing when he failed to return from a hike the day before.

Authorities do not yet have a cause of death, but the local coroner has ruled out foul play, a spokesperson for the Palm Springs Police Department told the Reporter.

Ford, from Pasadena, was a silver fox success story, launching his 22-year adult film career at the age of 40, according to Out magazine.

He worked with studios including MRS Releasing, RawF—kClub, All Worlds, Mustang, and Falcon Studios.

“He was a brilliant artist who always kept a song in his heart …Sweet, funny, kind, sassy – and hopelessly handsome,” Ford’s friend Tim Wood wrote on Facebook.

Ford had been a recording artist before his porn career, working with Denise Rich’s production company MIDE Productions as well as Virgin Records.

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Sen. Mike Lee’s obscenity bill is a free speech nightmare straight out of Project 2025’s playbook

A new bill in Congress threatens to dictate what Americans can read, watch and say online. On May 8, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah and Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill.,  introduced the “Interstate Obscenity Definition Act” (IODA) — a recycled attempt to ban online pornography nationwide.

While concerns about pornography, including moral and religious ones, are part of any healthy public debate, this bill does something far more dangerous: It empowers the federal government to police speech based on subjective values. When lawmakers try to enforce the beliefs of some Americans at the expense of others’ rights, they cross a constitutional line — and put the First Amendment at risk. 

The legislation aims to rewrite the legal definition of obscenity, an area of law that represents a very narrow exception to First Amendment protections.

The IODA seeks to sidestep the Supreme Court’s long-standing three-part test for obscenity, established in the 1973 case Miller v. California. The material must appeal to a prurient interest, depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Lee’s bill would scrap that standard and replace it with a broader, far more subjective definition. It would label content obscene if it simply focuses on nudity, sex or excretion in a way that is intended to arouse and if it lacks “serious value.” 

By discarding the concept of community standards, the IODA removes a key safeguard that allows local norms to shape what counts as obscenity. Without it, the federal government could impose a single national standard that fails to account for regional differences, cultural context or evolving social values.

The bill also deletes the requirement that material be “patently offensive,” a crucial element that keeps the obscenity test anchored in societal consensus. Instead, it replaces it with a subjective inquiry into whether the work was intended to arouse or titillate. But intent is notoriously difficult to prove and easy to allege. That language could easily sweep in a wide range of protected expression, including art, health information and sex education.

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Redefining Obscenity: Lawmakers Take Aim at More Online Content

Two Republican lawmakers are advancing a bill that could dramatically expand the federal government’s ability to criminalize certain content online.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Representative Mary Miller of Illinois have introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA), legislation that aims to overhaul the legal definition of obscenity and give prosecutors wide authority to target more online content.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Supporters of the bill claim it is designed to protect families and children from harmful material, but civil liberties advocates warn that its sweeping language threatens to criminalize large swaths of constitutionally protected expression.

IODA discards key elements of the Supreme Court’s long-standing Miller test, which has served as the nation’s benchmark for identifying obscene content since 1973. Under that framework, courts assess whether material appeals to prurient interest, depicts sexual conduct in a “patently offensive” way by community standards, and lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

Lee and Miller’s bill replaces that careful balancing test with a rigid federal definition. According to the proposed language, content is considered obscene if “taken as a whole, [it] appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion,” if it “depicts, describes or represents actual or simulated sexual acts with the objective intent to arouse, titillate, or gratify the sexual desires of a person,” and if it “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

Promoting the bill, Lee declared, “Obscenity isn’t protected by the First Amendment, but hazy and unenforceable legal definitions have allowed extreme pornography to saturate American society and reach countless children.” He added, “Our bill updates the legal definition of obscenity for the internet age so this content can be taken down and its peddlers prosecuted.”

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GOP Senator Introduces Bill to Make All Porn a Federal Crime, Following Project 2025 Playbook

Last year, the rightwing think-tank the Heritage Foundation launched Project 2025, which laid out much of the policy blueprint for the current Trump administration. One of the project’s espoused goals was to permanently criminalize all pornography. Now, a Republican senator with kind words for Trump has introduced a bill that would do just that.

Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) recently introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA), which would effectively criminalize all pornography nationwide by legally redefining what it means to be obscene. For years, “obscenity” has been all but a defunct legal category that narrowly defines speech that remains unprotected by the First Amendment. Lee would explode this legal category, expanding it to encompass virtually all visual representations of sex.

According to the bill text, “a picture, image, graphic image file, film, videotape, or other visual depiction” of any media that “appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion” would be considered criminal. In other words, if you have an old VHS tape of some Cinemax-style smut stashed away in your garage, you could, under this law, be considered to be harboring deeply illicit materials. Some critics have suggested that Lee’s definition of obscenity is so ridiculously broad that it could effectively criminalize Game of Thrones. That said, the punishments for merely possessing porn under the proposed law seem unclear at this point, as the legislation seems more focused on punishing the creators and distributors of racy material.

The law would “pave the way for the prosecution of obscene content disseminated across state lines or from foreign countries and open the door to federal restrictions or bans regarding online porn,” The Daily Caller writes.

“Obscenity isn’t protected by the First Amendment, but hazy and unenforceable legal definitions have allowed extreme pornography to saturate American society and reach countless children,” said Lee, in a press release about the bill. “Our bill updates the legal definition of obscenity for the internet age so this content can be taken down and its peddlers prosecuted.”

Lee’s view of pornography hews closely to that of the Heritage Foundation, which has similarly sought to crush the smut industry. In its Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025 defines pornography as the “omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children” and argues that the “people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned” and that “telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

It should be noted that porn has always been a hot-button issue and that critics have long tried to criminalize it. The history of the anti-pornography movement in the U.S. is a long and complicated one, littered with differing ideological justifications and strange bedfellows. In recent years, however, the anti-porn crusade has largely been led by the MAGA right.

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