Australia recently announced a ban on social media for anyone under 16, and the OnlyFans girlies are… clapping like a seal at Sea World with a fresh fish on the line. The idea behind the ban is that keeping kids off of social media will protect their mental health, and prevent them from making decisions online that they can’t take back. Some members of the sexfluencer set are applauding, saying that influencer culture over-glamorizes sex work, treating TikTok like a career day presentation for minors, and making the lifestyle seem easily achievable without owning the reality of having explicit content of oneself out in the world. Australia’s decided that maybe it’s time to limit minors’ social screen time before one more youngin’ tries to “duet” an OnlyFans creator’s pay stub.

So here’s the general gist of what’s happening down under: as of December 2025, anyone under the age of 16 is banned from social media apps, and must pass an identity check and age verification prior to their next TikTok binge. This is part of a broader rollout coming in 2026 that will require age verification for access to all online porn, including subscription-based platforms like OnlyFans. Australia’s essentially bringing on a digital bouncer, making sure that “no minors allowed” is enforced everywhere online. Politicians pitched it as protecting youth from “harmful content,” including influencers whose content glamorizes the lifestyle they’re able to afford due to their work in the adult entertainment industry. In short… Australian teens are about to learn what childhood felt like in 2003.

Digital sex workers have been chiming in to support the ban, with Tahalia Roe making a point to speak up early. Roe is a 19-year-old OnlyFans model who started her monetized page on the platform as soon as she turned 18. She said she was inspired by creators she saw online who appeared to be thriving due to their OnlyFans pages, and wanted that for herself. She didn’t feel tricked, but she did candidly say that her expectations were shaped by social posts from sexfluencers who omitted the downsides of adult content creation. Roe may have been 18 when she started creating explicit content, but she was seeing the glamorous lifestyle content when she was still a minor, leading her to make a career choice with serious repercussions that she can’t take back when she was barely into adulthood.

OnlyFans superstar Kayla Jade has also piped up. She’s an adult-entertainment heavyweight with no fewer than 2 million followers, making bank on OnlyFans, and keeping her mainstream social media followers engaged across Instagram and TikTok. Jade built her following by creating and sharing flashy “money-counting” videos, flexing her big earnings. Unfortunately, a large part of her audience was minors like Tahalia, who saw what Jade shared and wanted the stacks of money without having a clue what went into earning it. According to Jade, she’s since stopped posting these videos because she realized that they made sex work look like an easy and stress-free path to a luxurious life. Jade fears that young girls were seeing her content and thinking that the job was just fast cash and not, y’know, emotional labor that takes a serious toll on mental health, a digital permanence that you’ll never be able to shake, and being chronically stalked both online and off by dudes who live in their mom’s basement. Yours truly also has to wonder if these second thoughts started happening after the internet discovered earlier this year that Jade’s a mother, and went nuclear trying to find out more about the children she’d been careful to hide from any and all attachment to her name online.

The contrast between the two creators is an important piece to consider when deciding how you feel about Australia’s social media ban. On the one hand we have Kayla Jade, a creator who’s built the empire, has seen both sides of virality, and is familiar with both the pressure and the fallout that come with the adult content creation territory. She worried that her content created unrealistic expectations, and is now expressing caution and advocating for transparency while frantically making adjustments to her brand. On the other hand, we have Tahalia Roe, who is just starting out in adult content creation, and is the direct result of the influencer-to-OnlyFans-creator pipeline. She’s still learning her way around the realities of the industry, and represents the consequences that Kayla Jade has only just realized are a reality for her young followers. So we have two women on the same platform, one who is saying “hey, maybe don’t learn from me?” and the other who is saying “whoops, too late, I’m already here.”

Influencers who are producing adult content but marketing themselves as “lifestyle” creators are blurring the boundaries in a way that is harmful for impressionable young minds. Platforms’ algorithms are also pushing that content directly into the feeds of kids because it’s fun and keeps them engaged (dances, haul unboxing, “day in the life” content, you’ve seen it too). But without disclosure of what went into them being able to afford that life, there’s no context for understanding the harsh realities that go along with sex work. Teens see the glam (money, independence, luxury vacations), but have no way to access understanding the downsides (stigma, leaks, harassment, burnout, mental health strain, the never-ending permanence of explicit content, etc). Sex work isn’t a “get-rich-quick” scheme, and the public needs to see accurate representation. Australia isn’t overreacting, it’s simply protecting young people so that they don’t go blind into a line of work that will follow them forever.

Adult content creators who are in favor of the ban want people to understand the realities before joining them in the industry, and there are downsides that teens aren’t learning on TikTok. Namely that: leaks are inevitable, people assume that they own your attention because they pay $8.99/month, the content never disappears because the internet is forever (have I driven home that point yet?), and friends, coworkers, and strangers will all find your content and make their opinion about it your problem. OnlyFans creators like Tahalia who support the ban aren’t speaking out because they’re anti-sex-work, they’re just anti-misleading-content pipelines.

If you are an adult and want to be an adult content creator, fine. I think you should at least try to have a career in another industry first because transitioning out of explicit content creation is freaking impossible, but—have at it. However, minors shouldn’t be absorbing glamorized, filtered versions of sex work delivered through algorithm hacks. And if you’re a creator selling the lifestyle without presenting any reality receipts (looking at you, Ari Kytsya), you owe your audience transparency. Explicit content is forever, fame is fickle, the job is WORK, and life as an adult content creator is the furthest thing from a vacation. If the internet’s going to glamorize something, I submit that we glamorize drinking enough water. Imagine the wonders we could do to combat the ills of dehydration worldwide!