An article on the website Quillette explains the forces behind the recent attempt at censoring Onlyfans. It's the same old story-religious zealots allied with feminist zealots have accused the site of "sex trafficking" and so influenced other organizations to take an action that shows they oppose "sex trafficking." Luckily in this case, the credit card companies backed off but it's only a matter of time until the anti-sex zealots use the same tactic again.
OnlyFans was given a huge boost by the pandemic. Many sex workers, faced with the sudden loss of their regular incomes, and stuck at home with time on their hands, flocked to the platform and built new streams of income.
quillette.com
...Enormous resources have been raised to fight trafficking, but are then used to suppress prostitution and porn, which have now become synonymous with trafficking. This is cancel culture on steroids: small numbers of activists with access to immense funds are accusing literally every internet platform of trafficking. A single illegal video, a single photo, a single classified ad are now simply referred to as “trafficking,” with the implication that businesses like MindGeek and OnlyFans are directly complicit in rape and child abuse.
Backpage, Pornhub, and OnlyFans have simply been the testing ground for an ultra-conservative backlash that seeks to roll back the sexual revolution and to challenge the First Amendment. Since the 1990s, platforms have been protected from liability for user-generated content by Section 230 (a part of the US Communications Decency Act). This key piece of legislation has protected free speech online, and allowed the internet to become what it is today. For years, authoritarians of various stripes have tried to weaken Section 230, and they won in 2018 when the FOSTA/SESTA acts were passed, which made platforms liable for sex trafficking.
At the head of this assault is Laila Mickelwait of religious-right group Exodus Cry, and NCOSE, another group with roots in the religious Right (although it tries to distance itself from religion). These are supported by anti-porn feminist campaigners, and others on the Left. Perhaps the most influential of these is the
New York Times journalist Nick Kristof, who has helped spread anti-trafficking propaganda,
including false claims. This coalition is now flexing its muscles and using FOSTA/SESTA to mount full-scale attacks. Now, activists’ ambitions are rising beyond porn sites, and their sights are on Twitter, the least-censored of the large social media platforms, which
stands accused of sex trafficking. This movement to hold platforms accountable for their users' activities is possibly the biggest single assault on free expression in American history, and it would be naive to assume it will remain limited to attacking pornography and prostitution.