“When we talked to the workers, they just wanted to go back to the cockroaches, how the studio owner charges them for toilet paper or makes them work when they have their period. I couldn’t get people to talk to me about platforms, and that’s completely valid because of course you’re mad at the guy you know,” Killbride tells WIRED. “But there is another layer that has been left completely invisible. “This is a billion-dollar industry that has been able to excuse itself from the reprimand.”
WIRED attempted to contact BongaCams, Chaturbate, LiveJasmin, and Stripchat for comment on the investigation’s findings. No one responded.
The HRW report outlines crucial recommendations to improve conditions at both the studio and platform levels. This includes workplace safety standards for studios that are enforced through regular inspections. Models should be able to take breaks and receive a minimum wage for their work, studio management should not force models to perform specific sexual acts or accept that they will perform any acts on the models’ behalf. Additionally, models must have access to a confidential reporting mechanism so that they can notify law enforcement or other authorities of workplace violations.
Developing recommendations for the platforms themselves is even more nuanced. Killbride says most, if not all, popular adult streaming platforms have strict authentication requirements for creating accounts and specifically prohibit studio owners or anyone from accepting terms of service on behalf of another person. In practice, however, companies are not doing enough, HRW researchers say, to offer terms of service in a simple, understandable format in a variety of languages, including Spanish.
The researchers say platforms must also provide channels through which content creators can report violations and receive a timely response. And, most importantly, platforms should establish policies that allow models to take ownership of their accounts and transfer them from a studio. Researchers found that the current status quo on many platforms involves policy language that can confuse their users or technical complications that prevent content creators from claiming ownership of their accounts.
On top of everything else, the stakes are high when it comes to account ownership issues, because researchers found that studios often use “recycled” accounts (those that were authenticated and established by a videographer and then retained by a study) to circumvent minimum age requirements. and transmitting child sexual abuse material.
“We found that even though the platforms are quite strict and have completely clear policies about not streaming to children, studios still manage to recruit and stream children using fake IDs or, more commonly, recycled accounts,” Killbride says. “All of our research was done with adults, but many people we spoke to started streaming as children, when they were between 13 and 17 years old.”
Killbride emphasizes that the situation reflects an important tenet of sex worker advocacy and labor reform in general: listening to workers about their needs and the protections that would help them do their jobs more effectively and equitably also, simultaneously, protects other vulnerable populations. In this case, by allowing cammers to control and transfer their accounts and followers, the adult streaming industry could also dramatically reduce the prevalence of child sexual abuse material.