The Battle Between TikTok and Adult Content Creators

TikTok is awash with softcore porn – if that’s what you’d call mostly-clothed creators making provocative noises and speaking in thinly veiled euphemisms.

In one video, @cherryapricott moans while swishing a white substance around her mouth, before proclaiming to the camera, “I love the taste of Greek yogurt.” Another sees @oliviafleur_x, who has over 472,000 followers on the platform, talking suggestively while moving her hand, half off-camera, in an unequivocally sexual gesture. One popular trend sees creators accusing viewers of holding their phones in their left hand before counting them down with breathy encouragement. 

The internet is littered with free explicit porn, pandering to every preference and fantasy. So why are subtler forms of sexual content all over TikTok?

When sex content creators initially flooded TikTok, the app’s format and algorithm rewarded them: its #foryou page serves up content that’s aligned with a user’s interests, making it easier for creators to be discovered and grow than on Instagram or Snapchat, which are primarily friends and follower-based. “I believe many of my followers happened to stumble across my content whilst scrolling the FYP, and something about me or the style of my content caught their eye,” says Olivia Fleur.

Adult creator Grace Grey, who runs TikTok account @gracegreyasmr, believes there’s an audience on TikTok because “watching a creator there feels more personal, and you can engage with the creator more than traditional porn”.

Indeed, most creators fill requests and respond to comments from fevered followers, offering a coveted OnlyFans-like connection for free. “Viewers enjoy the GFE (girlfriend experience) feeling of personal attention and closeness,” explains Olivia Fleur. Fellow adult creator Madeline Miller agrees: “There’s something about seeing someone that you could maybe meet or be friends with and seeing them sexually.” 

The sexual content on TikTok likely benefits from the stigma attached to hardcore porn. “Traditional porn and the watching of it can come, for some people, with a huge amount of shame and guilt attached to it,” Fleur says. “Scrolling through TikTok or Instagram when you’re horny feels far more innocent than heading straight to a traditional porn site.” (The app’s sex-themed ASMR-themed erotic videos aren’t even primarily visual, so at first glance, they appear relatively innocent.) The sense of surreptitiousness that comes with clandestine sexual content on a supposedly safe-for-work app also likely plays a role, as does the knowledge that the videos could be taken down at any second.

TikTok uses both an algorithm and a real-life team of moderators to redact videos that violate their strict community guidelines, even if their rules are somewhat convoluted. The app prohibits “sex, sexual arousal, fetish, and kink behavior” and “the use of sexually explicit narratives”, but it does allow for “seductive performances or sexualized posing by adults, or allusions to sexual activity by adults”.

Where precisely they draw the line between “sexually explicit narratives” and “allusions to sexual activity” is unclear. Nevertheless, according to TikTok, the app removed 95 percent of sensitive and mature themed content found to violate its community guidelines in 2023’s third quarter. 

Grey, Fleur, and Miller say that this volume of censorship lines up with their experiences. “Any videos where I explicitly say something sexual or moan gets taken down,” says Grey. She and Fleur have had their accounts removed in the past and have had to cultivate new followings. Grey has multiple strikes on her current accounts, explaining that it’s not just the platform that takes issue with her videos but fellow users. Both Grey and Fleur have sometimes had videos reinstated after they appeal—most likely, Fleur suspects, after real people have reviewed them.  

According to a TikTok spokesperson, “While technology is more advanced at detecting overt nudity, there will always be borderline content that is more challenging for our systems to identify. Our moderators work alongside our automated moderation systems and take into account additional context and nuance which may not always be picked up by technology.”

TikTok is particularly prolific at moderating nudity, which its guidelines strictly prohibit. “Any form of nudity, even sometimes bikini videos, will get taken down,” explains Grey, who maintains that Instagram is comparatively lax. Miller agrees: “It’s almost like I do the first level of my clothing, fully clothed, on TikTok, and then I’ll take a piece off, move to Instagram, take another piece off, move to Twitter, and then take it all off, and I’m on OnlyFans.”

For adult creators, like the proprietors of any other business, social media is a means of self-promotion, helping them draw followers to more lucrative subscription-based channels. Grey shares erotic content on TikTok to drive traffic to her OnlyFans, because on TikTok, “it is relatively easy to grow a following quickly”.

But TikTok strictly prohibits creators from hyperlinking X-rated subscription services in their bios. As such, most creators link to their Instagram accounts, which link to landing pages like Linktree that transport followers to more explicit channels. 

Both Fleur and Miller claim that the censorship of their content has amplified in recent months, with their formerly lucrative TikTok-to-OnlyFans pipelines drying up. “Six to nine months ago, at least 80 percent of my subscribers came from TikTok. However, as the platform has changed so drastically, it is now more like 15 percent,” says Fleur. “At this point, my TikTok is completely useless. I think they’ve shadow-banned me after taking down so many of my videos,” Miller says.

The most pressing concern when it comes to sex-themed content on TikTok is that its demographic skews young: over half of 3-to-17-year-olds in the UK use the app (its minimum age is 13). Unlike Instagram, TikTok lacks an age verification process at signup, meaning children can easily evade restrictions by entering a fake date of birth.

Beyond takedowns, TikTok has measures to prevent young people from happening across—or seeking out and finding—inappropriate content, such as its Content Levels system. “When we detect that a video contains mature or complex themes, a maturity level will be allocated to the video to help prevent those under 18 from viewing it,” says the spokesperson.

Evidently, TikTok is taking staunch measures to erase sexual content and prevent young users from finding it. But according to Miller, it would be more “appropriate” for her videos to be age-restricted, which they’ve never been, than deleted entirely. “Sex has a way of being around you from a very young age in movies and media,” she says, “and social media is a part of that. It’s not just an app; it’s society.”

And she has a point: In reality, where humans go, porn will follow.