The multi-billion dollar adult streaming industry is fueled by horrific labor abuses

“When we were talking to the workers, they just wanted to go back to the cockroaches, and how the studio owner charges them for toilet paper or makes them work during their period. “I couldn’t get people to talk to me about the platforms, which is absolutely true because of course you’re angry at the guy you know, “But there’s a whole other layer that’s been left completely unseen,” Kilbride told WIRED. “This is a billion-dollar industry that has managed to exempt itself from reprimand.”

WIRED attempted to contact BongaCams, Chaturbate, LiveJasmin, and Stripchat to request comment on the research findings. No one responded.

The Human Rights Watch report outlines critical recommendations for improving conditions at the studio and platform levels. This includes occupational safety standards for studios that are enforced through regular inspections. Models should be able to take breaks and receive minimum wage for their work, and studio management should not force models to perform specific sexual acts or agree to do any work on behalf of the models. In addition, models must have access to a confidential reporting mechanism so that they can notify law enforcement or other authorities about workplace violations.

Developing recommendations for the platforms themselves is more precise. Killbride says that most, if not all, popular adult streaming platforms have strict authentication requirements for creating accounts and specifically prohibit studio owners or anyone from accepting the terms of service on someone else’s behalf. But in practice, companies are not doing enough, Human Rights Watch researchers claim, to provide terms of service in a simple, understandable format in a variety of languages, including Spanish.

Platforms also need to provide channels through which content creators can report violations and receive a timely response, researchers say. Most importantly, platforms should establish policies that enable models to take ownership of their accounts and move them out of the studio. The researchers found that the status quo on many platforms includes political language that may confuse their users or technical complexities that creators say prevent them from being able to confirm ownership of their accounts.

On top of everything else, the stakes are particularly high around account ownership issues, because researchers have found that studios often use “recycled” accounts — ones that were documented, created by a single camera and then maintained by the studio — to circumvent minimum requirements. For age and streaming of child sexual abuse material.

“We’ve found that even though the platforms are very strict and have very clear policies about not streaming kids, studios are still able to hire kids and stream them using fake IDs, or, which is more common, recycled accounts,” Kilbride says. “All of our research was with adults, but many of the people we spoke to started streaming as children when they were between the ages of 13 and 17.”

Kilbride emphasizes that the situation reflects an important principle in sex worker advocacy and labor reform in general: listening to workers about their needs and protections that will help them do their work more effectively and equitably, and, at the same time, protect other vulnerable populations. In this case, by allowing cameramen to control and transmit their accounts and followers, the adult live streaming industry can also significantly reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material.