404 Media

2025-11-20 15:45:13

OnlyFans Will Start Checking Criminal Records. Creators Say That's a Terrible Idea

OnlyFans will start running background checks on people signing up as content creators, the platform’s CEO recently announced.

As reported by adult industry news outlet XBIZ, OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair announced the partnership in a LinkedIn post. Blair doesn’t say in the post when the checks will be implemented, whether all types of criminal convictions will bar creators from signing up, if existing creators will be checked as well, or what countries’ criminal records will be checked.

OnlyFans did not respond to 404 Media's request for comment.

“I am very proud to add our partnership with Checkr Trust to our onboarding process in the US,” Blair wrote. “Checkr, Inc. helps OnlyFans to prevent people who have a criminal conviction which may impact on our community's safety from signing up as a Creator on OnlyFans. It’s collaborations like this that make the real difference behind the scenes and keep OnlyFans a space where creators and fans feel secure and empowered.”

Many OnlyFans creators turned to the platform, and to online sex work more generally, when they’re not able to obtain employment at traditional workplaces. Some sex workers doing in-person work turned to online sex work as a way to make ends meet—especially after the passage of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act in 2018 made it much more difficult to screen clients for escorting. And in-person sex work is still criminalized in the U.S. and many other countries.

“Criminal background checks will not stop potential predators from using the platform (OF), it will only harm individuals who are already at higher risk. Sex work has always had a low barrier to entry, making it the most accessible career for people from all walks of life,” performer GoAskAlex, who’s on OnlyFans and other platforms, told me in an email. “Removing creators with criminal/arrest records will only push more vulnerable people (overwhelmingly, women) to street based/survival sex work. Adding more barriers to what is arguably the safest form of sex work (online sex work) will push sex industry workers to less and less safe options.”

Jessica Starling, who also creates adult content on OnlyFans, told me in a call that their first thought was that if someone using OnlyFans has a prostitution charge, they might not be able to use the platform. “If they're trying to transition to online work, they won’t be able to do that anymore,” they said. “And the second thing I thought was that it's just invasive and overreaching... And then I looked up the company, and I'm like, ‘Oh, wow, this is really bad.’”

Checkr is reportedly used by Uber, Instacart, Shipt, Postmates, and Lyft, and lists many more companies like Dominos and Doordash on its site as clients. The company has been sued hundreds of times for violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act or other consumer credit complaints. The Fair Credit Reporting Act says that companies providing information to consumer reporting agencies are legally obligated to investigate disputed information. And a lot of people dispute the information Checkr and Inflection provide on them, claiming mixed-up names, acquittals, and decades-old misdemeanors or traffic tickets prevented them from accessing platforms that use background checking services.

Checkr regularly acquires other background checking and age verification companies, and acquired a background check company called Inflection in 2022. At the time, I found more than a dozen lawsuits against Inflection alone in a three year span, many of them from people who found out about the allegedly inaccurate reports Inflection kept about them after being banned from Airbnb after the company claimed they failed checks.

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404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg

“Sex workers face discrimination when leaving the sex trade, especially those who have been face-out and are identifiable in the online world. Facial recognition technology has advanced to a point where just about anyone can ascertain your identity from a single picture,” Alex said. “Leaving the online sex trade is not as easy as it once was, and anything you've done online will follow you for a lifetime. Creators who are forced to leave the platform will find that safe and stable alternatives are far and few between.”

Last month, Pornhub announced that it would start performing background checks on existing content partners—which primarily include studios—next year. "To further protect our creators and users, all new applicants must now complete a criminal background check during onboarding," the platform announced in a newsletter to partners, as reported by AVN.

Alex said she believes background checks in the porn industry could be beneficial, under very specific circumstances. “I do not think that someone with egregious history of sexual violence should be allowed to work in the sex trade in any capacity—similarly, a person convicted of hurting children should be not able to work with children—so if the criminal record checks were searching specifically for sex based offences I could see the benefit, but that doesn't appear to be the case (to my knowledge). What's to stop OnlyFans from deactivating someone's account due to a shoplifting offense?” she said. “I'd like to know more about what they're searching for with these background checks.”

Even with third-party companies like Checkr doing the work, as is the case with third-party age verification that’s swept the U.S. and targeted the porn industry, increased data means increased risk of it being leaked or hacked. Last year, a background check company called National Public Data claimed it was breached by hackers who got the confidential data of 2.9 billion people. The unencrypted data was then sold on the dark web.

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As of today, three more states join the list of 17 that can’t access Pornhub because of age verification laws.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

“It’s dangerous for anyone, but it's especially dangerous for us [adult creators] because we're more vulnerable anyway. Especially when you're online, you're hypervisible,” Starling said. “It doesn't protect anyone except OnlyFans themselves, the company.”

OnlyFans became the household name in independent porn because of the work of its adult content creators. Starling mentioned that because the platform has dominated the market, it’s difficult to just go to another platform if creators don’t want to be subjected to background checks. “We're put in a position where we have very limited power," they said. "So when a platform decides to do something like this, we’re kind of screwed, right?”

Earlier this year, OnlyFans owner Fenix International Ltd reportedly entered talks to sell the company to an investor group at a valuation of around $8 billion.

Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South

As of today, three more states join the list of 17 that can't access Pornhub because of age verification laws.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-11-20 15:11:25

Ukraine Is Jamming Russia’s ‘Superweapon’ With a Song

The Ukrainian Army is knocking a once-hyped Russian superweapon out of the sky by jamming it with a song and tricking it into thinking it’s in Lima, Peru. The Kremlin once called its Kh-47M2 Kinzhal ballistic missiles “invincible.” Joe Biden said the missile was “almost impossible to stop.” Now Ukrainian electronic warfare experts say they can counter the Kinzhal with some music and a re-direction order.

As winter begins in Ukraine, Russia has ramped up attacks on power and water infrastructure using the hypersonic Kinzhal missile. Russia has come to rely on massive long-range barrages that include drones and missiles. An overnight attack in early October included 496 drones and 53 missiles, including the Kinzhal. Another attack at the end of October involved more than 700 mixed missiles and drones, according to the Ukrainian Air Force.
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“Only one type of system in Ukraine was able to intercept those kinds of missiles. It was the Patriot system, which the United States provided to Ukraine. But, because of the limits of those systems and the shortage of ammunition, Ukraine defense are unable to intercept most of those Kijnhals,” a member of Night Watch—a Ukrainian electronic warfare team—told 404 Media. The representative from Night Watch spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to discuss war tactics.

Kinzhals and other guided munitions navigate by communicating with Russian satellites that are part of the GLONASS system, a GPS-style navigation network. Night Watch uses a jamming system called Lima EW to generate a disruption field that prevents anything in the area from communicating with a satellite. Many traditional jamming systems work by blasting receivers on munitions and aircraft with radio noise. Lima does that, but also sends along a digital signal and spoofs navigation signals. It “hacks” the receiver it's communicating with to throw it off course.

Night Watch shared pictures of the downed Kinzhals with 404 Media that showed a missile with a controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPA), an active antenna that’s meant to resist jamming and spoofing. “We discovered that this missile had pretty old type of technology,” Night Watch said. “They had the same type of receivers as old Soviet missiles used to have. So there is nothing special, there is nothing new in those types of missiles.”

Night Watch told 404 Media that it used this Lima to take down 19 Kinzhals in the past two weeks. First, it replaces the missile’s satellite navigation signals with the Ukrainian song “Our Father Is Bandera.”
A downed Kinzhal. Night Watch photo.
Any digital noise or random signal would work to jam the navigation system, but Night Watch wanted to use the song because they think it’s funny. “We just send a song…we just make it into binary code, you know, like 010101, and just send it to the Russian navigation system,” Night Watch said. “It’s just kind of a joke. [Bandera] is a Ukrainian nationalist and Russia tries to use this person in their propaganda to say all Ukrainians are Nazis. They always try to scare the Russian people that Ukrainians are, culturally, all the same as Bandera.”

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Do you know anything else about this story? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +1 347 762-9212 or send me an email at matthew@404media.co.

Once the song hits, Night Watch uses Lima to spoof a navigation signal to the missiles and make them think they’re in Lima, Peru. Once the missile’s confused about its location, it attempts to change direction. These missiles are fast—launched from a MiG-31 they can hit speeds of up to Mach 5.7 or more than 4,000 miles per hour—and an object moving that fast doesn’t fare well with sudden changes of direction.

“The airframe cannot withstand the excessive stress and the missile naturally fails,” Night Watch said. “When the Kinzhal missile tried to quickly change navigation, the fuselage of this missile was unable to handle the speed…and, yeah., it was just cut into two parts…the biggest advantage of those missiles, speed, was used against them. So that’s why we have intercepted 19 missiles for the last two weeks.”
Electronics in a downed Kinzhal. Night Watch photo.
Night Watch told 404 Media that Russia is attempting to defeat the Lima system by loading the missiles with more of the old tech. The goal seems to be to use the different receivers to hop frequencies and avoid Lima’s signal.

“What is Russia trying to do? Increase the amount of receivers on those missiles. They used to have eight receivers and right now they increase it up to 12, but it will not help,” Night Watch said. “The last one we intercepted, they already used 16 receivers. It’s pretty useless, that type of modification.”

According to Night Watch, countering Lima by increasing the number of receivers on the missile is a profound misunderstanding of its tech. “They think we make the attack on each receiver and as soon as one receiver attacks, they try to swap in another receiver and get a signal from another satellite. But when the missile enters the range of our system, we cover all types of receivers,” they said. “It’s physically impossible to connect with another satellite, but they think that it’s possible. That’s why they started with four receivers and right now it’s 16. I guess in the future we’ll see 24, but it’s pretty useless.”

Russia fires 500 drones at Ukraine in deadly overnight attack, Zelenskyy says

At least five people were killed across the country, Zelenskyy said.

^{David Brennan (ABC News)}

Humphrey Duncombe

2025-11-20 08:35:52

A quanto pare circa una pecora maschio su 12 è omosessuale, quindi non si accoppia con le femmine, quindi è inservibile a livello commerciale e dunque viene mandata al macello, ma in Germania esiste un allevamento che salva le pecore omosessuali e ne raccoglie, fila e tesse la lana per produrre abbigliamento gay-friendly con l’etichetta “I Wool Survive”. 🏳️‍🌈

Non si finisce mai d’imparare.

gcn.ie/grindr-fashion-collecti…

404 Media

2025-11-19 17:17:34

Joe Rogan Subreddit Bans 'Political Posts' But Still Wants 'Free Speech'

In a move that has confused and angered its users, the r/JoeRogan subreddit has banned all posts about politics. Adding to the confusion, the subreddit’s mods have said that political comments are still allowed, just not posts. “After careful consideration, internal discussion and tons of external feedback we have collectively decided that r/JoeRogan is not the place for politics anymore,” moderator OutdoorRink said in a post announcing the change today.

The new policy has not gone over well. For the last 10 years, the Joe Rogan Experience has been a central part of American political life. He interviews entertainers, yes, but also politicians and powerful businessmen. He had Donald Trump on the show and endorsed his bid for President. During the COVID and lockdown era, Rogan cast himself as an opposition figure to the heavy regulatory hand of the state. In a recent episode, Rogan’s guest was another podcaster, Adam Carolla, and the two spent hours talking about Covid lockdowns, Gavin Newsom, and specific environmental laws and building codes they argue is preventing Los Angeles from rebuilding after the Palisades fire.
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To hear the mods tell it, the subreddit is banning politics out of concern for Rogan’s listeners. “For too long this subreddit has been overrun by users who are pushing a political agenda, both left and right, and that stops today,” the post announcing the ban said. “It is not lost on us that Joe has become increasingly political in recent years and that his endorsement of Trump may have helped get him elected. That said, we are not equipped to properly moderate, arbitrate and curate political posts…while also promoting free speech.”

To be fair, as Rogan’s popularity exploded over the years, and as his politics have shifted to the right, many Reddit users have turned to the r/JoeRogan to complain about the direction Rogan and his podcast have taken. These posts are often antagonistic to Rogan and his fans, but are still “on-topic.”

Over the past few months, the moderator who announced the ban has posted several times about politics on r/JoeRogan. On November 3, they said that changes were coming to the moderation philosophy of the sub. “In the past few years, a significant group of users have been taking advantage of our ‘anything goes’ free speech policy,” they said. “This is not a political subreddit. Obviously Joe has dipped his toes in the political arena so we have allowed politics to become a component of the daily content here. That said, I think most of you will agree that it has gone too far and has attracted people who come here solely to push their political agenda with little interest in Rogan or his show.” A few days later the mod posted a link to a CBC investigation into MMA gym owners with neo-Nazi ties, a story only connected to Rogan by his interested in MMA and work as a UFC commentator.

r/JoeRogan’s users see the new “no political posts” policy as hypocrisy. And a lot of them think it has everything to do with recent revelations about Jeffrey Epstein. The connections between Epstein, Trump, and various other Rogan guests have been building for years. A recent, poorly formatted, dump of 200,000 Epstein files contained multiple references to Trump and Congress is set to release more.

“Random new mod appears and want to ruin this sub on a pathetic power trip. Transparently an attempt to cover for the pedophiles in power that Joe endorsed and supports. Not going to work,” one commenter said under the original post announcing the new ban.

“Perfectly timed around the Epstein files due to be released as well. So much for being free speech warriors eh space chimps?,” said one.

“Talking politics was great when it was all dunking on trans people and brown people but now that people have to defend pedophiles that banned hemp it's not so fun anymore,” said another.

You can see the remnants of pre-politics bans discussions lingering on r/JoeRogan. There are, of course, clips from the show and discussions of its guests but there’s also a lot of Epstein memes, posts about Epstein news, and fans questioning why Rogan hasn’t spoken out about Epstein recently after talking about it on the podcast for years.

Multiple guests Rogan has hosted on the show have turned up in the Epstein files, chief among them Donald Trump. The House GOP slipped a ban on hemp into the bill to re-open the government, a move that will close a loophole that’s allowed people to legally smoke weed in states like Texas. These are not the kinds of things the chill apes of Rogan’s fandom wanted.

“I think we all know what eventually happened to Joe and his podcast. The slow infiltration of right wing grifters coupled with Covid, it very much did change him. And I saw firsthand how that trickled down into the comedy community, especially one where he was instrumental in helping to rebuild. Instead of it being a platform to share his interests and eccentricities, it became a place to share his grievances and fears….how can we not expect to be allowed to talk about this?” user GreppMichaels said. “Do people really think this sub can go back to silly light chatter about aliens or conspiracies? Joe did this, how do the mods think we can pretend otherwise?”

Megaphone Embeddable Player

^{playlist.megaphone.fm}

404 Media

2025-11-19 15:20:59

Massive Leak Shows Erotic Chatbot Users Turned Women’s Yearbook Pictures Into AI Porn

An erotic roleplay chatbot and AI image creation platform called Secret Desires left millions of user-uploaded photos exposed and available to the public. The databases included nearly two million photos and videos, including many photos of completely random people with very little digital footprint.

The exposed data shows how many people use AI roleplay apps that allow face-swapping features: to create nonconsensual sexual imagery of everyone, from the most famous entertainers in the world to women who are not public figures in any way. In addition to the real photo inputs, the exposed data includes AI-generated outputs, which are mostly sexual and often incredibly graphic. Unlike “nudify” apps that generate nude images of real people, these images are putting people into AI-generated videos of hardcore sexual scenarios.

Secret Desires is a browser-based platform similar to Character.ai or Meta’s AI avatar creation tool, which generates personalized chatbots and images based on user prompting. Earlier this year, as part of its paid subscriptions that range from $7.99 to $19.99 a month, it had a “face swapping” feature that let users upload images of real people to put them in sexually explicit AI generated images and videos. These uploads, viewed by 404 Media, are a large part of what’s been exposed publicly, and based on the dates of the files, they were potentially exposed for months.

About an hour after 404 Media contacted Secret Desires on Monday to alert the company to the exposed containers and ask for comment, the files became inaccessible. Secret Desires and CEO of its parent company Playhouse Media Jack Simmons did not respond to my questions, however, including why these containers weren’t secure and how long they were exposed.

💡
Do you have a tip about AI and porn? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.

The platform was storing links to images and videos in unsecured Microsoft Azure Blob containers, where anyone could access XML files containing links to the images and go through the data inside. A container labeled “removed images” contained around 930,000 images, many of recognizable celebrities and very young looking women; a container named “faceswap” contained 50,000 images; and one named “live photos,” referring to short AI-generated videos, contained 220,000 videos. A number of the images are duplicates with different file names, or are of the same person from different angles or cropping of the photos, but in total there were nearly 1.8 million individual files in the containers viewed by 404 Media.

The photos in the removed images and faceswap datasets are overwhelmingly real photos (meaning, not AI generated) of women, including adult performers, influencers, and celebrities, but also photos of women who are definitely not famous. The datasets also include many photos that look like they were taken from women’s social media profiles, like selfies taken in bedrooms or smiling profile photos.

In the faceswap container, I found a file photo of a state representative speaking in public, photos where women took mirror selfies seemingly years ago with flip phones and Blackberries, screenshots of selfies from Snapchat, a photo of a woman posing with her university degree and one of a yearbook photo. Some of the file names include full first and last names of the women pictured. These and many more photos are in the exposed files alongside stolen images from adult content creators’ videos and websites and screenshots of actors from films. Their presence in this container means someone was uploading their photos to the Secret Desires face-swapping feature—likely to make explicit images of them, as that’s what the platform advertises itself as being built for, and because a large amount of the exposed content is sexual imagery.

Some of the faces in the faceswap containers are recognizable in the generations in the “live photos” container, which appears to be outputs generated by Secret Desires and are almost entirely hardcore pornographic AI-generated videos. In this container, multiple videos feature extremely young-looking people having sex.

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“After discovering this content, I’m not going to lie… there are times it made me not want to be around any more either,” she said. “I literally felt buried.”
404 MediaSamantha Cole

In early 2025, Secret Desires removed its face-swapping feature. The most recent date in the faceswap files is April 2025. This tracks with Reddit comments from the same time, where users complained that Secret Desires “dropped” the face swapping feature. “I canceled my membership to SecretDesires when they dropped the Faceswap. Do you know if there’s another site comparable? Secret Desires was amazing for image generation,” one user said in a thread about looking for alternatives to the platform. “I was part of the beta testing and the faceswop was great. I was able to upload pictures of my wife and it generated a pretty close,” another replied. “Shame they got rid of it.”

In the Secret Desires Discord channel, where people discuss how they’re using the app, users noticed that the platform still listed “face swapping” as a paid feature as of November 3. As of writing, on November 11, face swapping isn’t listed in the subscription features anymore. Secret Desires still advertises itself as a “spicy chatting” platform where you can make your own personalized AI companion, and it has a voice cloning mode, where users can upload an audio file of someone speaking to clone their voice in audio chat modes.

On its site, Secret Desires says it uses end-to-end encryption to secure communications from users: “All your communications—including messages, voice calls, and image exchanges—are encrypted both at rest and in transit using industry-leading encryption standards. This ensures that only you have access to your conversations.” It also says stores data securely: “Your data is securely stored on protected servers with stringent access controls. We employ advanced security protocols to safeguard your information against unauthorized access.”

The prompts exposed by some of the file names are also telling of how some people use Secret Desires. Several prompts in the faceswap container, visible as file names, showed users’ “secret desire” was to generate images of underage girls: “17-year-old, high school junior, perfect intricate detail innocent face,” several prompts said, along with names of young female celebrities. We know from hacks of other “AI girlfriend” platforms that this is a popular demand of these tools; Secret Desires specifically says on its terms of use that it forbids generating underage images.
Screenshot of a former version of the subscription offerings on SecretDesires.ai, via Discord. Edits by the user
Secret Desire runs advertisements on Youtube where it markets the platform’s ability to create sexualized versions of real people you encounter in the world. “AI girls never say no,” an AI-generated woman says in one of Secret Desire’s YouTube Shorts. “I can look like your favorite celebrity. That girl from the gym. Your dream anime character or anyone else you fantasize about? I can do everything for you.” Most of Secret Desires’ ads on YouTube are about giving up on real-life connections and dating apps in favor of getting an AI girlfriend. “What if she could be everything you imagined? Shape her style, her personality, and create the perfect connection just for you,” one says. Other ads proclaim that in an ideal reality, your therapist, best friend, and romantic partner could all be AI. Most of Secret Desires’ marketing features young, lonely men as the users.
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We know from years of research into face-swapping apps, AI companion apps, and erotic roleplay platforms that there is a real demand for these tools, and a risk that they’ll be used by stalkers and abusers for making images of exes, acquaintances, and random women they want to see nude or having sex. They’re accessible and advertised all over social media, and that children find these platforms easily and use them to create child sexual abuse material of their classmates. When people make sexually explicit deepfakes of others without their consent, the aftermath for their targets is often devastating; it impacts their careers, their self-confidence, and in some cases, their physical safety. Because Secret Desires left this data in the open and mishandled its users’ data, we have a clear look at how people use generative AI to sexually fantasize about the women around them, whether those women know their photos are being used or not.

A Deepfake Nightmare: Stalker Allegedly Made Sexual AI Images of Ex-Girlfriends and Their Families

An Ohio man is accused of making violent, graphic deepfakes of women with their fathers, and of their children. Device searches revealed he searched for "undress" apps and "ai porn."

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-11-19 13:57:26

Podcast: The Epstein Email Dump Is a Mess

We start this week with a rant from Jason about how the latest dump of Epstein emails were released. It would be a lot easier to cover them if they were published differently! After the break, we talk about Joseph’s piece about a contractor hiring essentially randos off LinkedIn to physically track immigrants for $300. In the subscribers-only section, Sam tells us about a new adult industry code of conduct that has been a long time coming
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/_6tVI4jh__Y?…

• Our New FOIA Forum! 11/19, 1PM ET
• Contractor Recruiting People on LinkedIn to Physically Track Immigrants for ICE, Will Pay $300
• Major Porn Studios Join Forces to Establish Industry ‘Code of Conduct’

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

^{Apple Podcasts}