Introduction (00:11):
In this episode of Consider Before Consuming, Megan Lundstrom joins us for a second time since we last spoke to her. Megan has become the director of the Resilience Fund at Polaris, a direct cash assistance program for survivors of all forms of trafficking in the United States. The conversation delves into the role of platforms like OnlyFans in the modern sex trade. Megan discusses the platform’s portrayal as an empowering tool for financial freedom and contrast it with her research findings, which reveal patterns of exploitation and the challenges of identifying trafficking within its ecosystem. She examines how OnlyFans defines consent, the psychological and financial toll on creators, and the ways traffickers leverage the platform for profit. With that, let’s jump into the conversation. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Consider Before Consuming.

Fight The New Drug (01:03):
Well, Megan, thank you so much for joining us again on the Consider Before Consuming podcast. Since the last time you were here a couple of years ago, you’ve started a new role at Polaris. So for any of our listeners who haven’t heard your past interview, can you share a little bit about yourself, the work that you do and how you became involved in anti-trafficking work?

Megan (01:24):
Yeah, absolutely. Hello. I’m so excited to feedback. Yeah, so my name is Megan Lundstrom. I have been in the anti-trafficking field for about 10 years now. About eight of those. I ran the Avery Center, which was a direct service organization for victims and survivors of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. And then over the last two years, yeah, I transitioned to a role at Polaris. So I am the director of the Resilience Fund, which is a direct cash assistance program providing up to $500 a month for 18 months for survivors of all forms of trafficking across the us. And I got into anti-trafficking work really because of my own lived experience as a survivor initially, and recognizing there weren’t services for survivors in my local community. And then really my interest in the field grew as my understanding grew and as I moved through my own healing process.

Fight The New Drug (02:30):
Amazing. Well, we’re so grateful that you’re doing this work, and I am so excited to talk with you today a bit about trafficking and also specifically about OnlyFans. But first you mentioned the Resilience Fund. It’s such an important initiative. Can you explain a little bit about its mission and the impact it has on survivors?

Megan (02:48):
Yeah, so I feel like I could talk about the Resilience Fund all day. It really started with Polaris first and foremost, listening to survivors. And what they were hearing from calls on the national human trafficking hotline day in and day out is that there’s just a lot of gaps in services for survivors. There may not be a specific service available in a specific region, or a survivor may not qualify for it. And oftentimes the solution to that is just needing direct cash assistance. They just need to be able to fill that gap. But what we also found from the National Survivor Study was that 43% of survivors of human trafficking are living on less than $25,000 a year and oftentimes supporting families of two to three individuals on that income. And so with that knowledge and listening to survivors, excuse me, the Resilience Fund was born and like I mentioned, it provides direct cash assistance.

(03:54):
So up to $500 a month for up to 18 months. And the goal of the Resilience Fund has really been to provide a period of stability for survivors and really focusing on trusting survivors, so listening to survivors and then trusting survivors because we know best what we need in our lives. And so studies really show it’s not about needing to learn how to make good choices with money. It’s about having access to that money to take care of oneself and take care of one’s family. And so we just passed the mid program mark and have a mid program evaluation report coming out in January, which I’m really excited to share. We have some really promising findings, but probably the most exciting finding so far to date is each month we send recipients a survey, and one of the questions that we ask is, did you have to take an exploitative work opportunity to make ends meet this month? And so at the beginning of the program, about 60% of respondents we’re saying that they were still having to take exploitative work opportunities at mid program. That number has dropped to 25%, and it’s kind of staying at that number now. So what we’re seeing is that direct cash assistance can actually prevent exploitation and trafficking from happening in the first place, which is just incredible.

Fight The New Drug (05:27):
It’s so amazing, and I’m so glad to hear that. I can’t wait to read the report when it comes out. For anyone who’s a little bit unfamiliar with some of the circumstances, individuals find themselves in that lead to sometimes situations of trafficking, how do economic and financial vulnerabilities specifically make individuals more susceptible to trafficking and exploitation?

Megan (05:50):
Yeah, great question. So really at the end of the day, trafficking is a financial crime. And so individuals who have economic instability are experiencing that instability or living in poverty have a lack of access to opportunities and employment are ultimately very high risk for exploitation. And so in that moment of vulnerability of asking those questions, how am I going to feed my children? How am I going to keep a roof over my head? That’s where traffickers step in with promises of a job or a solution or to be a provider. And so that is why we see economic instability such a huge vulnerability, but particularly in these generational cycles where you have a caregiver who is struggling with economic instability, and you have children that are growing up in that environment. And so these cycles are oftentimes seen to repeat themselves. So addressing that economic instability both right in that moment is really important. But then also during that time, while they are experiencing economic stability, continuing to work on addressing those core systems barriers to economic stability, so things like criminal record relief, debt repair, credit repair, accessing mental and behavioral health services, building out support systems, like all of those things really add up to create an environment of economic stability and thereby just reducing or even eliminating that vulnerability to trafficking and exploitation.

Fight The New Drug (07:44):
I want to ask you a little bit about OnlyFans because it’s a platform that we know many turn to during moments of financial vulnerability or some of that economic instability. But for any of our listeners who may be unfamiliar with what OnlyFans is, can you just briefly describe what OnlyFans is?

Megan (08:01):
Yeah, I’ll do my best. So OnlyFans is an online platform that anyone can technically go on and create an account and become a content creator. And so initially, OnlyFans was kind of marketed to anyone. If you liked cooking, if you liked yoga, if you already had a social media following, you could create an OnlyFans account and then generate, you could monetize that. So you could create videos and photos sharing whatever skills or knowledge that you have with your follower base. The reality is that OnlyFans is overwhelmingly sexually explicit content.

Fight The New Drug (08:50):
Thank you for that. So because of that, many do turn to OnlyFans during these moments of needing money basically, and the platform markets itself as empowering. So many individuals approach the platform believe it’s going to be empowering and generate money for them. Based on your research, how does OnlyFans define and assess consent in the content that’s created on its platforms? And what is your perspective on whether or not the platform is empowering and or is the right choice maybe for individuals who find themselves in those positions?

Megan (09:29):
Yeah, yeah, so many good questions, and you might have to remind me as I’m talking. So let’s start with just is the platform empowering? I want to acknowledge everybody is going to have their own experience with any tool, but I think the argument of this is a form of adult entertainment or sex work where customers do not have physical contact to the person who is selling sex or selling content. And so the belief there is that it is therefore safe for the individual who’s creating the content. And to some regard, I would say yes, I guess the person does not have technical physical access to that individual, but in terms of it being safe, I think that how harm can happen to an individual that’s a content creator looks really different. So it doesn’t mean that it’s a safe platform. It doesn’t mean that harm isn’t happening, it just means that harm is going to happen in a way that we don’t necessarily think of in terms of a physical assault, which by the way, can also still happen if somebody’s information is shared online, if they’re doxed, if they have a following, which they have to on other social media platforms, there are ways for subscribers or fans to find an individual and show up in person, or they may know them in real life.

(11:12):
And so that harm, it’s still not a safe platform. But in addition to that, there’s so many psychological harms that have always existed in the commercial sex trade and have always existed on platforms like Webcaming and pornography. Those harms are still there. So that’s kind of the first piece of, is this a safe site? I would love to really dig into how OnlyFans defines consent. And I think that that really ultimately tells you a lot about the platform and they think about and care about in terms of harm and empowerment. So OnlyFans defines consent by the absolute bare minimum of the laws, and that is, first of all, the individual needs to be conscious, and secondly, the individual needs to appear to not be intoxicated. That’s it. That is how that platform defines consent. And so in 2024, we’re coming into 2025, we know collectively as a society that consent is so much more complex than being awake and sober. Those are just two pieces that I think in theory, a content moderator might be able to identify something maybe wrong in content that’s uploaded, but it does not come close anywhere close to really addressing the factors at play. When it comes to consent,

Fight The New Drug (13:00):
Simply existing is not the same thing as consenting to anything in any avenue, but especially, and particularly in this one. And I think it’s so important to consider consent and empowerment and safety because we’re going to be talking about trafficking on the platform, how traffickers leverage platforms like OnlyFans to exploit their victims or to exploit individuals. And what patterns and strategies have you observed that are happening on these platforms and that this tool has been available for these individuals to leverage in this way?

Megan (13:39):
Yeah, I think really traffickers are always going to seek the path of least resistance and greatest profits. At the end of the day, traffickers are business people. They think strategically in terms of how do I make the most money for the least amount of risk and as quickly as possible. And so thinking about traffickers and their use of OnlyFans, I do think that it is safer for ’em. I do think that it is easier for them. When we talk about empowerment and safety or harm reduction, I think it does a lot for traffickers. It is a very beneficial platform. I think really where we saw OnlyFans take off was during the pandemic, and that really started with a lot of individuals experiencing economic instability. And a lot of people who maybe historically had not experienced that level of instability before because we were in a global pandemic, and the whole world kind of got turned upside down during that time.

(14:52):
So you had a lot of vulnerable individuals, but you also had individuals who were already vulnerable, who were already being exploited. And so traffickers, at the end of the day, they don’t care that there’s a pandemic. They don’t care that standard operations that they had been engaging in or coercing their victims to engage in, they didn’t care that those went away. At the end of the day, the quota is still due. And so OnlyFans really created or provided this solution where victims could continue to experience exploitation, but from a public health perspective safely in their own home. So they weren’t having to engage and expose themselves perhaps to Covid, but they could continue to be exploited and generate money for their traffickers. So I think that’s a big piece. I think what we’ve seen over the last several years is OnlyFans has increased in popularity, the sale of sex online and really building out the ways in which sex buyers have access to people selling sex and the different parts of their lives.

(16:16):
It is no longer just a transaction. There’s a whole opportunity to commodify every component of a relationship and every component of a human being. So traffickers really benefit from all of that. And then it is an incredibly difficult platform to investigate. So law enforcement, there’s paywall barriers. There’s the way that it’s set up, there’s no way to just search OnlyFans. So individual creators have to generate and drive traffic of their own from other places online directly to their profile on OnlyFans. And so it can be really hard to identify indicators of exploitation, and then to get in and build a case again, it’s very hard to do. And so I think law enforcement has had to really rethink how do we identify exploitation? What are our strategies? If we can’t do an undercover operation at a hotel, how are we going to address this? Yeah, so I think it has really changed the commercial sex landscape radically. I could continue, but I’ll pause there.

Fight The New Drug (17:38):
And for anyone who’s listening and not watching this on video, I just want to note that when you said continue from a public health perspective, safely used air quotes, because we know that the safety of the platform, as we just discussed, is not necessarily safe. And I’m curious to know, as you’ve talked with content creators on OnlyFans, what is their perception of the safety of the platform?

Megan (18:00):
So I think you’re going to get, again, kind of this wide variety of perspectives, and I think those perspectives have a lot to do with that person’s journey in life up until this point. So I think generally speaking, what we see presented on social media about OnlyFans, it’s very glorified. You see these content creators that are sometimes generating tens of thousands of dollars a month. And so there is this perception of glamor and luxury and empowerment and free time and being able to chase the American dream, so to speak. The reality is I think most content creators generate an average of $200 or something. It is actually not profitable for most individuals. And so I think a lot of content creators that I’ve spoken with, they haven’t made that much. So they went in thinking, this is going to be the solution to my economic instability. So either it’s going to supplement the income that I already have so that I can make ends meet, or I don’t have any income and this is going to be my primary source of income. And they find themselves working around the clock. So creating the content, editing the content, uploading the content, marketing the content, there’s so much work involved in it.

(19:43):
And so there has just been this, I think, collective realization of how much work it takes. And so then when you actually do the math on the payouts, a lot of people are working 10, 12, 14, 16 hours a day to do all of these pieces, and they’re only generating a few dollars at a time in sales. And so that isn’t profitable, that doesn’t provide economic stability, and it really reinforces these feelings of exploitation where I’ve done all this work, I’ve put myself out there, I’ve made myself emotionally available and physically available and visually available, and I’m not even making any money off of it. It’s very unfulfilling. I think some individuals have invested a lot in terms of video equipment and film software. I don’t even know all of the equipment that goes into video production. And so sometimes they end up in the red because they’ve invested all of this and it’s not even breaking even at that point.

(20:50):
So I would say that’s probably the majority. But I’ve also spoken to individuals who do have a large following relative and do generate more than a few dollars a month. Some content creators who are what is referred to as like a VIP, so kind of they’re top creators. And I think in those situations, really when you start to look behind the scenes, there’s so much emotional labor. So again, thinking about the harms, so much emotional labor, oftentimes those individuals have some type of a manager or a trafficker that is ultimately the primary beneficiary of any revenue. But there’s also all of these other individuals, these other companies that have come in and said, let me do the chatting for you and you can pay me to do that piece and let me do the professional photography and you can pay me for that piece. And so then you see these big content creators are just being nicked and dimmed in addition to really feeling watched from every direction. They go on Instagram and they’re being watched there. They go on X, and they have customers trying to engage there. They have people in their community who know what they do and so want to talk to them. And that just gets overwhelming. So I think that’s really what I’ve seen overall. Again, it has radically changed the landscape of the sex trade and how we’re defining harm. I think we need to have more conversations about that.

Fight The New Drug (22:43):
What are some patterns or behaviors that make it difficult to identify trafficking on subscription-based platforms?

Megan (22:52):
Yeah, so really at the beginning of the pandemic, one of the things that financial institutions were struggling with was they were seeing all of these deposits coming in from OnlyFans, and they were like, it makes sense that trafficking is probably occurring, but we don’t know how to identify if somebody is experiencing forced fraud or coercion versus somebody who is a legally consenting adult that has done this of their own volition. Because the money laundering algorithms and software that they use, they don’t know how to read for OnlyFans. It’s a whole new behavior. And so we did a research project where we looked at a sample of individuals that we knew on social media, pretty explicit indicators of third party control. So they used hashtags, they used the emojis, they had photos, they self-identified as like, this is my exploiter in culturally relevant terms. And then we compared those with another sample on social media that didn’t necessarily have those indicators, which of course doesn’t mean that that person or people weren’t there, it just means they weren’t present on social media and observable.

(24:15):
But we looked at those two on social media and kind of compared what are the similarities and differences on their social media platforms and how they drive traffic to OnlyFans, and then what are the differences on the front side. So not behind the paywall, but just when you follow their link to OnlyFans, is there anything similar emojis, similar language that would indicate this may be an account that is worth subscribing to get behind the paywall to really start to understand things. And ultimately what we found is there’s no difference on OnlyFans in front of the paywall. There’s a ton of indicators on social media. Again, you can really see it, but that can be really difficult to identify that exploitation. It also, I think OnlyFans intentionally designed their website to kind of eliminate some of that risk liability to the company. So these companies learn from one another’s mistakes.

(25:26):
So with Backpage, we know that one of the pieces that really ultimately I caught them up at the end of the day was the search terms that were being edited. So Backpage was editing headlines and descriptions of content because people were searching for certain things. So they would remove the term barely legal and OnlyFans even have a search function. So they’ve just said, you have to find it on your own, which is sneaky, right? It’s smart, but it’s also going back to this piece of are they actually an empowering pro person platform or are they just trying to remove liability from themselves? So that pushes all of those searches onto other social media platforms where perhaps those hashtags and those terms are being searched anyways. And then really forces consumers to think strategically about what are the terms, how do I want to find somebody, what are my sexual interests? And then working to find those individuals on social media and then follow those links to OnlyFans. So I think those things have really made the platform incredibly difficult to identify and victims. And then even like I said, you go back to this piece of consent, and if all they’re looking for is this person conscious, what does their response to law enforcement saying, we think there’s more going on here. If they’re saying, well, they’re conscious, so we’re going to leave their account up, that’s really problematic and scary.

Fight The New Drug (27:27):
It really is so much less glamorous when you pull back the curtain and really take a look at what the platform is and how it’s operating. How do traffickers use technology to maintain control over their victims’ accounts on platforms? OnlyFans?

Megan (27:42):
Yeah, so I can just give an example from a research project that I’ve been working on. I have one publication out from it, but that publication covers about maybe 10% of the findings from this project. So there were 11 victims in this case that this trafficker had managed about, I think it was 13 OnlyFans accounts. So he had an OnlyFans account of his own where he did content creation with all of his victims, and then all of his victims also had OnlyFans accounts. And then he kind of had one that was a promotional OnlyFans account where he promoted them as kind of a talent agency that he ran. And so he looking through the backend data that was eventually subpoenaed. In this case, he had access to all 11 victims. So he already had access to them physically, but followed them on social media. He had their phone numbers, and then he had access to all of their accounts.

(28:59):
So he would log into their accounts and check how much money they had earned, check their messages, making sure that they were uploading content, he was uploading content on their accounts, he was initiating transfers of the income into his bank account regularly. So again, it just becomes another form of control for a trafficker. And one of the things that I did with that case was looked at the IP addresses of all of the login activity and then all of the times of the day. And so I was able to isolate, here’s when the trafficker is accessing their accounts. Here’s when the victims are, it’s likely the victim that’s logging in here. And you could really see he was logging in and checking their accounts literally around the clock. And if you think he’s doing that on one platform, he’s probably doing that on all platforms. And he had access to them through cash app and payment platforms, and just the world of technology allowed him to have access to every single area of their lives. And I think that’s very common. I wasn’t really surprised to see any of that. It more just was like, this is the first time seeing the paper trail of how controlling he is and how much access he has.

Fight The New Drug (30:32):
And again, if the only measure for consent is are they conscious when certainly all of these other behaviors, there’s no way to tell any of this just by being a subscriber or watching or consuming any of this content. So it’s important to bring attention to these things. And your report is so in depth. I would love to be able to link our listeners to that as well, if anyone is interested in viewing that and learning more. In your view, what role does the demand for commercial sex play in fueling trafficking and how can this demand be disrupted?

Megan (31:11):
Oh, my favorite worst thing to talk on, I hate saying favorite because it’s not great stuff, but I am very passionate about it and I have a whole economic model with lots of math around it of why it’s so important to address demand. But for the sake of everyone’s attention spans, I will not verbalize a whole bunch of math equations. Nobody wants to listen to that, and I’m totally fine with that. But I will say in short, when we think about demand for commercial sex, there are at least 10 times as many consumers of commercial sex as there are sellers. And so we can create estimates of prevalence. Each one has its limitations and weaknesses. We can’t just ask people who are being exploited to come check in at their local county courthouse and check a box that discloses that they’re being exploited. It’s not like a census.

(32:15):
And so it is really hard to pin numbers on things. But going back to this case study that I did across these 11 victims, there was one who was the trafficker’s kind of main victim, the bottom in this operation. She was a VIP on OnlyFans, so she was one of the top content creators, and he profited of his profits, about a million of it was off of her specifically, and about a year, year and a half I think. But in those subpoena documents was also all of the customer information. And that really, again, it really blew my mind because I’m thinking, okay, there’s one individual, you have one exploited person who is sometimes seeing on average around 10 commercial sex buyers a day for in-person commercial sex transactions. But for this OnlyFans content creator, there were almost a hundred thousand customers over those 18 months.

(33:28):
So that’s not just individual purchases. Those are unique customers, most of whom made multiple purchases. And again, when you think about access and what technology has allowed in terms of access, you have a hundred thousand buyers who have accessed one individual from all over the world. They have not needed to cross international lines. They don’t need to have a passport, they just need to have a credit card that’s accepted by only vans. And I forget how many countries it is listed in that report, but literally around the world. And this operation was based in the us. So a vast majority of the consumers were also Americans. And by the looks of information that’s collected in that the payment transactions, most of them are men if not all of them. And so you have American men who are consuming at scale, and that really aligns with other research that we’ve seen that American men are the number one consumers of commercial sex globally.

(34:49):
But yeah, when we think of that level of demand, it can feel so overwhelming, honestly, of just how do you even address that? You can’t even batch emails. It would take you so long to even reach out one time to a hundred thousand men and let them know, Hey, this was a trafficked individual. How do you even address that? And I’m not saying I recommend doing that, but I’m just saying for the sake of argument, this is such an overwhelming issue sometimes. So when it comes to addressing demand, I think there’s a lot. There’s so many things that need to happen, and I don’t know that one is more important than the other. I think they all need to happen at the same time. So right now, the United States prostitution related arrests are of the individual that’s selling sex. So even though we know that many times these individuals are being exploited and trafficked, they’re still being criminalized.

(35:51):
But research also shows that one out of 10 of those arrests is a sex fire, but there’s so many more of them. So as the young people say, the math ain’t math in there. So I think that’s one piece. But also, we cannot arrest our way out of this issue because it is so enormous. Law enforcement has many, many, many different crimes and the enforcement of different laws, they can’t just focus on sex buying. And so just saying, well just arrest all sex buyers, we would very quickly have very few people in our communities that weren’t in jail for purchasing sex. So I do think that this is a cultural issue. This is a public health issue, really understanding the harm and working to shift culture. And I think really having intentional conversations as men with peers is super important. I’ve facilitated John schools, so men that have been arrested for buying sex and presented a lot of this information in those over the years, and those are really interesting workshops to attend.

(37:20):
But I think at the end of the day, I’m a woman telling men that they’re making bad choices. And that’s hard to hear from somebody who’s not a part of your community. It never lands well, listening to somebody outside of your community tell you what your community needs to be doing. So I do think it is really important for men to have these conversations and address the bystander effect of you’re seeing your peers make comments. You are seeing your peers engage in different behaviors and invite you to participate in them. And it’s not enough to just say, no, thank you. You need to be doing more. You need to be active in practicing authentic allyship in this space because it really isn’t until we shift that culture that we’re going to see significant change when it comes to demand for demand for access to people’s bodies for sex.

Fight The New Drug (38:24):
So well said. And just to add to that, in the work that you’ve done with sex buyers and also in some of the reports you’ve spoken about the data you’ve collected from those purchasing information on OnlyFans, can you speak to the demographic of sex buyers? Because I think that a lot of people have an idea that it’s a certain type of isolated person who isn’t otherwise engaged in their community. And I’m just curious if you can share some of what you found to be true about the sex buyers that you’ve seen in these instances.

Megan (38:59):
Yeah, for sure. So I think overall in the United States, commercial sex buyers tend to be white, middle class, college educated, gainfully employed, often married men. And when you let that sink in and you think about who do I know? I work with those demographics, I have colleagues that fall into those demographics. My kids go to school and are taught by people in those demographics. And so I think that’s really important to understand that it’s not those people over there. It is mainstream demographics with significant privilege and power in our communities, and oftentimes a lot of respect, but also given a lot of leeway and have a lot of entitlements. So that’s broad. I would say with OnlyFans, some of the things that we found, so again, in that report, we have a hundred thousand email addresses of these customers. And so one of the things that I did was just went through and looked at any of those email addresses that maybe were associated with a company or a university.

(40:23):
And so what I found was a lot of different companies, so a lot of corporate emails, a lot of universities, but also a lot of high schools and elementaries and you name it. And so I think a lot of times men who purchase content from OnlyFans want to hide that from maybe their significant other, and so they purchase it through their place of employment. But the other piece that we have seen more recently in doing undercover demand reduction operations with local law enforcement, my research partner, Dr. Henderson, and I started asking those like, Hey, have you purchased anything from OnlyFans? And then if they said yes, starting to ask them more, just trying to really understand what is the continuum from purchasing content on OnlyFans and paying for sex in person. And so what we’ve started to see over the last several years is that sex buying has started to skew younger and younger.

(41:37):
So like I said, it’s usually middle age middle class white men. But with OnlyFans, we started to see this younger twenties and thirties men that were being arrested for paying for sex. And so when we asked them, do have OnlyFans, have you paid for subscriptions? What we were seeing, a lot of them were saying was, yeah, I learned about it during the pandemic or from social media or from a friend, and paying for subscription content just on a screen eventually was not enough. And that’s when they just said, I can actually purchase an individual that’s similar to this individual, or some of those OnlyFans content creators also sell sex in person. And so that, again, that entitlement to accessing that person or people that they believe represents what they’re seeing on the screen. So again, OnlyFans has really changed the demographics of who is paying for sex. They’ve changed because subscription prices are set by the content creators, it is financially accessible to more individuals. So instead of several hundred dollars per hour kind of a thing for a commercial sex act, you may be able to start engaging in purchasing sexually explicit content for $5, $10. And at the end of the day, it’s not enough because they’re still seeking more and it’s not being resolved. And so you see this escalation to in-person purchases.

Fight The New Drug (43:21):
Thank you for sharing all of that. I think you have such a unique perspective on this issue given the work that you’ve done and your own experiences, and I think these are the things nobody thinks about or talks about. When OnlyFans comes up, it’s so normalized, which speaks to why so many individuals are engaging on the platform. What do you see as the biggest challenge or biggest challenges and opportunities in the fight against trafficking in the coming years?

Megan (43:49):
Oh, so many. I think one of the challenges, especially with this trend to commercial sex online is what I have started to call. So there’s a saying that pimp and ain’t dead. And so what I have seen is that pimp and ain’t dead. It’s just gone corporate. And so looking at this OnlyFans case study really opened my eyes to how many for-profit companies are complicit in the facilitation of online exploitation. And I hadn’t really thought about it in great detail. We kind of identify these big bad boogeyman problem websites or platforms, OnlyFans and PornHub. And so not to say that they don’t have a massive responsibility here, but when you think about how does a person get from sitting on their sofa to accessing this person, there is a cell phone or a web browser that is opened. And so you have Apple that’s involved.

(45:11):
You have Chrome or Microsoft Explorer, you have a wifi company, you have Sprint, Verizon, all of those data companies that connect the individual to that content. And then you have a lot of, like I said, these companies where a lot of the emotional labor and the management of these online accounts are being outsourced to. And when you start to divide out exploitation across all of these companies, it gets so diluted in terms of the legalities of things. So somebody picks up their phone and they go on a website, is Verizon responsible for what they do? You know what I mean? So there’s so many companies along the way that it is being facilitated by all of these different companies, all these different platforms, but none of those individual things is inherently illegal. It’s not illegal to use your web browser on your phone or your laptop.

(46:16):
It’s not illegal to use Incognito or A VPN to visit something that you don’t want people knowing that you visit. So there’s all of those. And then you have the credit card processing companies, you have the banks, you have all of these pieces. And I think when we think of more traditional or pretech exploitation, you have the trafficker and you have the victim and you have the customer. And so you maybe have a cell phone where the transaction is maybe initiated, but you have the trafficker and the victim and the customer that are doing all of those pieces. And so it becomes much clearer that there is a third party trafficker that is overseeing and arranging and benefiting from that. But when you have it just kind of all the pieces kind of spread out across all these companies, all four corners of the worldwide web, it gets really hard to determine who is actually engaging in forced fraud and coercion and who be liable, and how do we protect the vulnerable individual from that because there’s multiple points of coercion and exploitation happening.

(47:39):
So I think that that’s going to continue to be a really big challenge because many reasons, but big companies have big lawyers, and again, for the sake of argument, at what point do each of those uses become illegal and looking at this continuum of facilitation. So that’s a challenge. On the flip side though, I think, again, going back to this OnlyFans case study, I think it is a really good example of tech facilitated exploitation. There is a paper trail to everything. So being able to see when this person logged in, what they did, when they logged in, where the money was transferred to, there’s so much more detail that historically we’ve really had to guess make assumptions pieced together and hope for the best. So with that, I think if we can really establish what tech facilitated exploitation entails and where force fraud and coercion is present, it does give us this huge opportunity to build these cases where all the data is there, does a victim even need to testify at that point because we have everything on the back end of these platforms. So I think that there’s a lot of opportunity there. And that’s on the response side. And then on the prevention side, I think same thing, technology really allows us to engage at scale and connect with people, both vulnerable individuals and people who are either contemplating paying for sex or purchasing content or individuals who already are, and providing resources and education and points of intervention that we have not been able to do before, like I said, at scale, that we are able to do now.

Fight The New Drug (49:54):
In addition to those opportunities. What else gives you hope in this ongoing fight against trafficking and exploitation, and what keeps you motivated to continue the work that you’re doing?

Megan (50:04):
Yeah. Oh man. So many things. So thoughts for me, my why has always been that I want people to know that they’re seen as individuals. And so when you’re working on these huge issues, you have a hundred thousand customers in this one case, where do you even begin? That can feel super overwhelming. And so when the work gets to feeling overwhelming, it’s really helpful for me to connect back with my why. So anybody that is doing this work in any capacity, I highly recommend, first of all, know your why and do your work around your why. Because if you are running around kind of not aware of your why, you are potentially causing harm to yourself and to others unknowingly. So really understanding what is it that drives you to do the work that you do. But then once you do know that, it can be so recharging to go back to that touch point and find ways for individuals.

(51:24):
For me, I want people to feel seen. And so what projects I take on, what I say yes to at the end of the day has to be something where I know that I am helping people feel seen in a way that they haven’t felt seen before. So I would encourage others to do the same and have a life outside of this work because it is super hard and you see the absolute worst of people, but you also get to see these incredible moments of joy and connection and people feeling safe, being vulnerable, and being honored in that moment and supported and seeing community show up. And so those things are also just really important. This work is, it’s a marathon. It is not a sprint. So pacing yourself and taking care of yourself, number one,

Fight The New Drug (52:26):
It’s so beautifully said. Is there anything we haven’t covered today that you’re hoping to share with our listeners or message you wanted? Leave them with?

Megan (52:34):
I think the message that I always want to leave people with around this work, I think when people maybe are not involved in anti-trafficking work or just learning about it, again, it can feel so overwhelming and where is my role in this? And so I just always want to assure people, you do not have to quit your job and go back to school and become a social worker or something like that to do anti exploitation work. There are so many ways to do anti exploitation work and just engage as allies. I think a simple example is as parents, we are doing anti exploitation work every day. When we show up for our kids when we are home at the end of the day and have a meaningful conversation with them, that’s anti exploitation work. So yeah, I think that’s always my one thing is you do not have to completely overturn your entire life to do anti exploitation work. It’s really being mindful about what am I already doing and understanding how can I pour more into that or just be more aware that I’m already doing those things, and that’s being a parent is enough.

Fight The New Drug (53:52):
Megan, thank you so much for your time and the incredible work that you’re doing with all of the different initiatives that you have. If anyone is wanting to learn more about your work or if survivors are looking for resources, do you want to share any links or information that you want to leave our listeners with?

Megan (54:10):
Yeah, absolutely. So any survivors that are looking for community work opportunities, resources, I would love to hear from them. And the best way to do that is to reach out through Polaris. So you can go to polaris project.org. The Resilience Fund has a landing page and contact information on that page. I also manage Polaris’s Survivor List serves. So we send out resources and opportunities specific to survivors, and always happy to share information and make sure folks know what is available out there in the field and beyond. So yeah, I think that would be my one thing to share with anybody who’s listening that’s a survivor.

Fight The New Drug (54:59):
Amazing. Thank you so much for your time, Megan, and we hope to have you back in another couple of years to discuss any of the work that you’ve been doing In the meantime. And for any of our listeners who haven’t heard your previous episode, we’d love for you to listen as well.

Megan (55:13):
Thank you.

Promos (56:17):
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Outro (57:10):
Thanks for joining us on this episode of Consider Before Consuming. Consider Before Consuming is brought to you by Fight the New Drug Fight. The New Drug is a non-religious and non-GI legislative organization that exists to provide individuals the opportunity to make an informed decision regarding pornography by raising awareness on its harmful effects using only science facts and personal accounts. Check out the episode notes for resources mentioned in this episode. If you find this podcast helpful, consider subscribing and leaving a review. Consider before Consuming is made possible by listeners like you. If you’d like to support consider Before Consuming, you can make a one-time or recurring donation of any amount at FTND.org/support. That’s F-T-N-D.O-R-G/support. Thanks again for listening. We invite you to increase your self-awareness. Look both ways. Check your blind spots, and consider before consuming.