“When we talked to workers, they just wanted to go back to the cockroaches, to the studio owner charging them for toilet paper or making them work while they’re on their period. I haven’t been able to get people to talk to me about platforms, and that’s totally valid because obviously you’re angry at the guy you know,” Killbride tells WIRED. “But there is a completely different layer that has been completely invisible. This is a billion-dollar industry that has been able to justify itself in the face of reprimands.”
WIRED attempted to contact BongaCams, Chaturbate, LiveJasmin and Stripchat for comment on the survey results. None replied.
The HRW report makes key recommendations for improving conditions at both studio and platform levels. This includes studio safety standards enforced through regular inspections. Models must be able to take breaks and be paid a minimum wage for their work, studio management should not force models to perform specific sexual acts or agree to perform any act on the models’ behalf. Additionally, models should 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 claims that most, if not all, popular adult streaming platforms have strict authentication requirements for account creation and specifically prohibit studio owners or anyone from accepting terms of service on someone else’s behalf. In practice, however, HRW researchers say, companies do not do enough to offer terms of service in a simple, understandable format in a variety of languages, including Spanish.
Platforms must also provide channels through which content creators can report violations and receive a quick response, researchers say. Most importantly, platforms should establish policies that allow models to take ownership and transfer accounts away from the studio. Researchers found that the current status quo on many platforms includes policy language that can confuse users, or technical complications that content creators say prevent them from claiming ownership of their accounts.
What’s more, the stakes are particularly high when it comes to account ownership, as researchers have found that studios often use “recycled” accounts – those that have been authenticated and set up by a single cameraman and then retained by the studio – to circumvent minimum requirements. age and stream child sexual abuse material.
“We found that even though platforms are quite strict and have completely clear policies on banning children from streaming, studios still manage to recruit and stream children using fake IDs or, more commonly, recycled accounts,” Killbride says. “All of our research focused on adults, but many of the people we talked to started streaming as children, between the ages of 13 and 17.”
Killbride emphasizes that the situation reflects an critical principle of support for sex workers and labor market reform in general: listening to workers about their needs and the protections that will facilitate them do their job in the most effective and fair way, while also protecting other vulnerable groups in society. In this case, by allowing videographers to control and stream their accounts and followers, the adult streaming industry could also drastically reduce the prevalence of child sexual abuse material.