Sweden vs. OnlyFans: Up to a year in prison for paying for personalized online sex

BarcelonaSweden has declared war on OnlyFans and made it illegal to buy personalized sex videos online. This platform, where Users can only view content if they pay a recurring subscription the person who publishes them is one of those affected by a new law that will come into force on July 1. Sweden was the first country in the world to criminalize clients and not prostitutes, whose 1999 law prohibits the purchase of sexual services. Now, the Scandinavian country is updating its Penal Code to reflect the new realities and extending the ban to certain online practices as well.

OnlyFans is an adults-only website that allows anyone to sell sexually explicit videos of themselves. The new regulations make it illegal to pay for another person to perform a sexual act so the buyer can watch it on screen. It can be punished with up to one year in prison, the same sentence as for physical sex customers. It also prohibits soliciting or financially exploiting someone to perform sexual acts remotely in exchange for compensation, at the behest of the buyer, which can be classified as pimping and can carry up to four years in prison.

Under the new law, passed by Parliament last week, it will be illegal to specifically ask someone to create personalized content. However, the regulations do not prohibit pornography, and therefore, Swedes will be able to continue paying a subscription and watching videos created for general users. Some experts have warned that this circumstance will make the work of prosecutors and police more difficult. "It will be difficult to distinguish between the production of permitted pornography and the purchase of sex," Linnea Wegerstad, a criminal law researcher at Lund University, told SVT television.

Sweden pioneered a model 25 years ago, copied by other countries such as Norway, France, and Ireland, whose fundamental idea is to end demand in order to end prostitution. In this way, the Scandinavian country outlawed the purchase of sex without criminalizing prostitutes, but rather the clients and pimps, since it punishes not only those who pay for sex, but also those who operate a brothel or profit from the services of a prostitute.

The emergence of new practices through online platforms like OnlyFans has sparked debate about whether the ban should also be extended online, although some have warned of the difficulty of pursuing it in practice. "The main idea is that what is illegal in real life is also illegal online," summarized Mikael Damsgaard, a member of parliament for the conservative Moderats party, which leads the right-wing coalition government in Sweden.

The "gateway" for young people into prostitution

One of the reasons given by the Swedish government when defending the new legislation is that platforms like OnlyFans are "the gateway to prostitution" for young people. Virtually all parties represented in parliament supported its approval, except for the Social Democrats, who call for going further. "This is digitalized prostitution, where the lines between pornography and human trafficking are blurred, but where exploitation and abuse exist," said opposition Social Democrat MP Sanna Backeskog during the parliamentary debate on the law. "Subscribing to someone's sex videos is, in practice, ordering sexual acts. This should also be illegal," she argued.

According to the government, the law has received broad support from organizations working with women who have been subjected to sexual abuse or exploited in prostitution or pornography. In contrast, lawmakers have not consulted OnlyFans or other similar sites. The American company's communications director, Sue Beeby, requested a meeting with Swedish Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer. In a statement to the newspaper Swedish Newspaper, highlighted the economic contribution of OnlyFans to the Swedish economy: "In Sweden, OnlyFans pays $12 million in taxes every year and the platform offers individual creators – many of them women, LGBTQ+ people and marginalized entrepreneurs – the opportunity to support themselves independently."

Founded in 2016, OnlyFans has hundreds of millions of users, with the most successful earning millions of dollars a year selling content, mostly of a sexual nature. The company, currently owned by a US investment fund, grew exponentially during the COVID pandemic. In 2023, it reported profits of more than €5.8 billion, while in 2020 it had earned around €330 million, according to Reuters.