Fighting Deplatforming and Censorship on OnlyFans

Transcript

[Music] foreign [Music] hello my name is Sarah I'm a researcher I do research on the centralized system and today I will be talking about fighting de-platforming and censorship on only fans um okay Wait nothing is happening oopsie um

oh okay okay got it got it yeah sorry sorry about this so um so let's go again so let's start by giving a bit of context here so when covet hit in 2020 most of the sex work industry had two moods online and this is for obvious reasons because we had lockdowns and restriction and in-person work was not possible um however many sex workers have indicated that by moving their work online they have improved their physical safety and also they found that this was more lucrative so all together even after covid and after restriction were lifted they decided to stay to stay

online um so during covering one platform that gained significant popularity is only fans so it's very popular so probably you've heard about it it's a subscription platform so what it means is that um you will need to buy a subscription a monthly subscription in order to have access to that Creator content um so as I said it's gained like huge popularity uh during kovid there is now over 1 million content creators on onlyfan hundreds of millions of users and um they generate billions in Revenue so in 2021 only fans unexpectedly

announced that they will ban explicit contents from the platform and this is despite the fact that sex work or sex workers are the one that's made the platform like popularity and success so there was a huge backlash and again think about it like this was back in 2021 um we still had covered restrictions in a lot of places in the world so for a lot of people really like only fans were was their main Revenue so uh this would have been like a very very terrible decision for really like millions millions of creatives so thankfully only fans decided to revert their decision because of this um huge backlash but very sadly

um for a sex worker this is nothing new they have been um they have been under constant straight from centralized platform for example all the financial services PayPal venmo buy me a coffee all of these the bound sex workers not talking about like Instagram Tick Tock even if even if you don't do sex work which is not allowed on Instagram and Tick Tock if you are a sex worker usually you will be um ban or Shadow ban completely arbitrarily and as I've just said like only fans just one day decided that they will just like ban explicit content so they are they are really like the main the main victim of censorship online really and um and as a matter of fact most of the online sex workers on only fine site

the platforming as their number one concern so as a result of all of this they um there have been a lot of platforms that emerge recently whether in web 2 but also in web 3 most of them would be like um nft platforms and uh honestly like I would have shown my slides but there are like many many more they will not all fit in one slide um it's it's becoming hugely popular however having um all of these discern platform it's really a pain point for both creators and fans because creators if they want to reach all of their fans they will need to be on all of this platform they will need to to spend a lot of time

posting on every website and similarly for fans either they have to be on multiple different platforms or they will not have access to all of their creators in one place and also it's not great for platforms because they have to fight against a huge Network effect and as I've mentioned at the beginning of the talk only fans is so big that it's really it's really hard for platforms to to compete so recently there has been um like a paradigm that's gained a popularity which is about building protocols not platforms so the idea is that um as before we will have a lot of different platforms a lot of different applications but unlike um what we had before this platform will form a

Federated Network so what it means is that um so here on my Slide the purple diamonds are platforms and they will basically all exchange data um with one another and so what this means is like you can register on one platform and um follow the contents of someone that is registered on another platform because they all inter operate so this is great because it means that you have full profile portability so let's say you register with platform a and then platform a decide that they want to ban you know explicit contents um well you can just go to platform B and you will not use your follower you're following anything your content

everything was you will still be here so um basically you don't have any deep platforming concern like even if a platform was 2D platform you you can just take everything you have and go to another platform you don't lose anything um and also this is great for platforms because there is no locking effect so if if you are a new platform and you come and you have a better UI better content moderation content curation um you can just come and attract new users and they can come with all of their content all of their social graph so it makes to move like much easier so so really it's easier for a platform that has better UI to to succeed compared to starting from scratch so you so you've probably heard about

all of this platform that implement this Paradigm of building protocols not platform um that that I've mentioned so Mastodon is probably the most popular one blue sky is quite present they are in close beta it was started by Jack from Twitter um and then forecaster lens this one no sir all of them are blockchain based and like an actress but all of them implement this Federated model of um of social media so all of them they are Twitter like or like um it's also called like micro micro blogging platform so it's not really adapted to the only fans model and our highlights why so the main issues with adapting these

protocols that I've done that I've just mentioned to any fans is that on this protocol the content is public if you think about only funds or subscription platform you need to give access to your content only to the people who are paying your subscription so you don't want the content to be public also on most of these protocols um like Fargo service guy in my student there's no monetization obviously you want we want monetization and most importantly there is no privacy this is a huge problem your social graph is public on all of this platform again thinking about only fans and maybe like sensitive com like content people don't necessarily want anyone to see who they

are following and who they have subscribed to so uh surprises very very important in that context um so yeah so basically if we want to build a decentralized only fans we can take inspiration from all the Federated social media that I've mentioned and then add a decentralized payment on top of them as well as a decentralized access management so to manage who has access to the content and who has not and finally privacy so I'm going to start by talking about subscription and uh decentralized payment because that's the easiest problem to solve and uh the way to solve this we know how to do decentralized payment we can use blockchains such as ethereum especially if we think about subscription

um using a smart contract like ethereum is very very easy easy to do this so so I wanted to be talking much about this I will just mention one project that I think is pretty cool that is called super fluid that helps with recurring payments on blockchains so that's for payments and now I'm going to talk about something that is a bit more difficult to achieve and this is the decentralized access management so again as I've mentioned before it would not be ideal to have content um public in this like Federated Network because then we could have a malicious application a malicious platform that will redistribute the content for free and maybe even still you know steal the

money from the creators so so we don't want to have the content public I'm just going to take one second to note that preventing um content theft is not like completely possible even if you implement the best anti-screen recording software anyone could just take their phone and record the screen so it's not completely possible to prevent content theft unfortunately but we we want to make it like at least as hard as possible we don't want to facilitate it so uh so the thing that we need to do is to encrypt the content and then problem is solved basically the content is encrypted and uh the content creator will decrypt it only for those who have subscribed

so the um let's say strawman way to do this is um so our coton creator which is the rabbit here will encrypt its contents and encrypt it using a symmetry symmetric key then um here on my slide I put that the encrypted content will be stored on ipfs any other decentralized storage solution could work and whenever our user so user blue wants to access the contents then the the rabbit the content creator will just encrypt the key that it uses to encrypt the contents but according to user blue public key so basically here user blue

only or blue user will be able to decrypt the key and once they have decrypted the key they can access the content so here um basically you see that decrypting the key is the same as decrypted contents because the key is about decrypted contents um so I just want to emphasize that the content is not stored on the blockchain because that would be too costful um but from now on I will not say encrypted the key I will just encrypt the content just to make it shorter but just have in mind like this model so what's the problem with this the problem with this is that this is very costful for the content creator basically the content creator will need the to encrypt its content according to each public key of each of their subscriber so that's a lot of work

so one way to solve this is to Simply well simply let's say to delegate this work of doing the encryption to a separate Network so basically what we will have is something like that we will have a new network of node so this node this could be you know anyone it could be ethereum node it could also be like the Federated network node or anyone but just like decentralized let's say decentralized Network and um this will be based on a threshold cryptography so basically this decentralized network they will have one public key PK that represents all of them and the quantum Creator the rabbits will encrypt um the contents only Accord like

according to PK so the Aggregates public key of the network and then what would happen like the content creator can just go offline do whatever they want and whenever when users want to access the content they will submit a request on a smart contract on chain and the network the separate network will do the re-encryption such that user like the blue user can decrypt the content so basically they do the work of re-encrypted the contents every time for every users and um again I've talked about social cryptography so as long as some special T out of nodes are honest then uh like this will be done in second way every user that has the right to access the

contents will be able to access the content and every users that does not have the right to access the content will not be able to access it um assuming that's a t out of and nodes are honest so just to summarize a bit what I've said so far so what I've said is like we have a Federated network of platforms so again this platform did you they do like mostly the UI contact moderation content creation whatever payment are processed on ethereum we can use ipfs to store the encrypted contents and also we have our encryption Network that ensures that everyone who needs to decrypt the content can do so um so I have not uh I have not gone into

the details of the re-encryption network and the threshold Network because it's time for this look but I just want to mention this three projects if you want to look them up and look at the cryptography behind this for encryption Network um yeah check this out um last thing I want to mention is privacy so as I mentioned uh before like subscription will happen on a smart contract so basically what we want to do is have private smarts contracts and um this is becoming possible thanks to zero knowledge proof so again here I will not go into the details because that is almost the end of the talk but I'm just gonna mention uh two projects that I think are pretty cool that are doing um private smart contracts the same you can you can look

this up and um before finishing my talk I just want to um mention a few open problems with everything I've just said so first I've mentioned that the content could be stored on ipfs however ipfs is not really like high performance so if you think about an app like only fans you do want to have a high performance so this is not ideal so and it really doesn't exist as of today high performance decentralized storage also the whole re-encryption network that I've mentioned you can see that it's not really scalable you still need to have like one request and one response per view so I think we did in a more scalable way is also an open problem I have not mentioned at all token amides

and incentivization and obviously that's also something very important and so yeah that's it if you are interested in this open programs feel free to contact me and otherwise thank you very much for your time [Applause] foreign feel free to ask hi thank you so much um I was actually wondering um do you work uh the content creator for only fun or like what's the background for that I can understand if and how we can help you yeah okay thank you

any more questions hi I'm a developer for not safe work so I understand your problem quite a lot um so in terms of writing content to the blockchain how are you um thinking about solving problems such as people who upload content that is really problematic so it's really really bad stuff so that's one of the challenges why we don't want to be putting certain types of content on the blockchain and what considerations are you taking or considering to address those problems so so first just to retire that the content is not actually on the blockchain it will be for example

like on ipfs so um so yeah so that will be kind of like similar problem that they already have on apfs and so the way we could do like contact moderation is to it on the UI so basically um you as a platform like you will moderate and not show to your user like um explicit content and then it's down to the ipfs note or everyone who store the data to decide the whether they want to delete the content or not but content moderation can happen at the platform level and at the UI level basically that's that would be the main yeah main goal I think it is the last question we have time only for one yeah I think if that infrastructure

works really fluently it could be used for a lot of other stuff too because we Face kind of the same issue with storing files like data PDFs Excel sheets and we need to distribute access uh decently so that basically we're dealing with the same and right now they haven't found the perfect web 3 solution and we use box kind of before that's solved okay well actually if you want to tell me more after the talk I'm curious about like your use case because um yeah yeah definitely I think there are many other use case I think this one is the most obvious one because of the censorship but I'm actually very very curious about your you just say so happy happy to chat thank you thank you thank

you very much [Music] [Music] foreign [Music]