OnlyFans and the Far-Reaching Power of Payments Companies

OnlyFans and the Far-Reaching Power of Payments Companies

Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., the payments duopoly worth a combined $850 billion in market value, spend most of their time running silently in the background of a $2 trillion payments industry that enables purchases with little pieces of plastic.

Yet every so often, the elephant in the room becomes impossible to ignore. The kerfuffle around OnlyFans, a social network that says it was pressured by banking-service providers including Bank of New York Mellon Corp. to ban explicit content — a move it’s since reversed — is one such revelatory moment. It points to the centrality of online payments in people’s lives and the increasingly fraught role of the firms that manage them.

Like Casablanca’s Captain Renault, who was “shocked, shocked” to discover gambling under his roof, payment firms are being prodded to confront their ties to online porn. A text message in December from billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman to the boss of Mastercard, over reports of illegal content on Pornhub featuring underage victims of assault, spurred action that led the card to suspend the website.