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Comment by leppr | Hacker News Reader

This is no different to buying any kind of service or good. How do you know that cheap editing job on fiverr is not made by an enslaved worker?

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> How do you know that cheap editing job on fiverr is not made by an enslaved worker?

That's my point, you don't and can't. You should be cognizant of the possibility of abuse, not write off the possibility. Don't pretend to know when you couldn't possibly know. People who claim that abuse doesn't exist on Onlyfans are almost certainly wrong. How much abuse content exists on OF is unknown; unknown to everybody in this conversation, and unknown even to OF. Whether OF is ethical depends on how much abusive content is on OF, which none of us know, and how much abuse somebody thinks should be tolerated, which is subjective.

Anybody who claims that Onlyfans is ethical is making a claim about the rate of abuse which they can't back up.

That's a high standard for being considered "ethical". I'd argue that as long as the platform incentivizes voluntary work more than forced work, it goes in the right direction and is thus "ethical", or at least not "unethical".

What the platform incentivizes is not all there is to consider. Actual outcome must also be considered. Nike can go through all the motions of incentivizing the use of ethical labor in their factories, but if it turns out that despite their efforts, a significant portion of their sneakers are made by child slave labor, then I'm not going to go around claiming Nike is an ethical business. Maybe I'll buy a pair of Nike shoes anyway, because I don't see a better option, but I still won't claim that Nike is ethical. I'll leave extolling the virtue of Nike to the Nike PR department. Anyway, intentions do count for something I think, but outcome is more important.

Note that I am not claiming Onlyfans is unethical. I don't know if Onlyfans is ethical or not. I don't know what the rate of abuse content on Onlyfans is. That's information I simply don't have. Furthermore, I'm not even sure what rate of abuse content society should tolerate from a company. Probably if these are only isolated incidents that are swiftly recognized and rectified, it shouldn't damn the whole platform. Also, I think it probably matters whether that rate is trending up or down, but I don't have any information about either possible trend. I lack the information I need to support the claim that Onlyfans is ethical, and I think the rest of you do as well.

Why are you holding them to a higher standard than any other business? They're ethical in the sense that they follow the same ordinary business ethics standard that we apply to everyone else; none of us know and none of us can possibly know how much abuse is going on in, say, Apple's supply chain, but few would say that means they're an unethical company.

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