“When we talked to workers, they just wanted back to the cockroaches, how the studio owner charges them for toilet paper or makes them work when they’re on their periods. I couldn’t get people to talk to me about platforms, and that’s totally valid because of course you’re mad at the guy you know,” Killbride tells WIRED. “But there is a completely different layer that has become completely invisible. This is a billion-dollar industry that has been able to excuse itself from rebuke.”
WIRED attempted to contact BongaCams, Chaturbate, LiveJasmin and Stripchat to request comment on the research findings. Nobody answered.
HRW’s report outlines crucial recommendations for improving conditions at both studio and platform level. This includes occupational safety standards for studios that are enforced with 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 act on behalf of the models. In addition, models should have access to a confidential reporting mechanism to notify law enforcement or other authorities of violations in the workplace.
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 someone else. In practice, however, companies are not doing enough, HRW researchers argue, to offer terms of service in a simple, understandable format in a number of languages, including Spanish.
Platforms must also provide channels through which content creators can report violations and receive a timely response, the researchers say. And, crucially, platforms should establish policies that allow models to take ownership of and transfer their accounts from a studio. Researchers found that the current status quo on many platforms involves policy language that can confuse users or technical complications that content creators say prevent them from being able to claim ownership of their accounts.
On top of everything else, the stakes are particularly high for questions of account ownership because the researchers found that studios often use “recycled” accounts—those that were approved and established by a camera and then retained by a studio—to circumvent requirements for minimum age and stream material about sexual abuse of children.
“We found that even though the platforms are quite strict and have very clear policies about not streaming kids, studios still manage to hire and stream kids using fake IDs or, more commonly, recycled accounts,” says Killbride. “Our research was exclusively with adults, but many people we spoke to started streaming as children when they were 13 to 17.”
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 most effectively and fairly also protects other vulnerable populations. In this case, by allowing cameramen to control and transfer their accounts and their followers, the adult streaming industry could also drastically reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material.