The fantasy of the influencer economy is to find an audience for your content, be swept away on the winds of the algorithm, and live a glamorous life with all the money you’re making. And someone is certainly making money.
Take adult web-camming, for example, a billion-dollar global industry in which content creators build up devoted followings as they stream themselves to meet endless demand. But far from the dream of mansions and diamonds and luxury cars, a new report finds that webcam models are often making pennies on the dollar in deplorable conditions where they face bedbugs and cockroaches, filth, and shared streaming equipment often covered in semen, blood, vomit, or feces.
Research released this week by Human Rights Watch shines a light on conditions in one of the adult camming industry’s hubs, Colombia. Working with two sex-worker-led organizations in the country, HRW found that models stream for hours on end in filthy studios that provide the bare minimum of equipment and facilities. The studios typically keep workers under constant surveillance to make sure they aren’t taking breaks, even to drink water. And most charge extra for essentials like soap, sanitizer, and tissues.
“There was an epidemic of rashes on our hands and fingers because of the dirty keyboards, and it just kept spreading,” one 33-year-old webcam model based in Bogotá told HRW in October 2023. “But really, the mental health issues are the worst.”
Many cammers come to Colombia’s big cities to use studios because they can’t afford a computer and other streaming equipment. They work to save up enough money so they can eventually go off on their own. But between the cut of the revenue that popular streaming platforms like BongaCams, Chaturbate, LiveJasmin, and Stripchat take, and the percentage taken by studios, models are left with very little. And perhaps worst of all, even if they want to switch to a different studio or save up enough to go out on their own, studio bosses almost always control the cammers’ streaming accounts and will typically refuse to release them—and the valuable followings the cammers have earned.
The situation is particularly complex, HRW researcher Erin Killbride says, because the immediate, horrific labor abuses inflicted by studio owners can obscure the larger context—the report alleges that the streaming services lack corporate accountability about the human toll of content creation on their platforms.
“When we were talking with workers, they just wanted to get back to the cockroaches, how the studio owner charges them for toilet paper or makes them work when they’re on their period. I couldn’t get people to talk to me about platforms, and that’s completely valid because of course you are mad at the guy you know,” Killbride tells WIRED. “But there’s a whole other layer that has been left 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 about the research findings. None responded.
HRW’s report outlines crucial recommendations for improving conditions at both the studio and platform levels. This includes occupational safety standards for studios enforced with regular inspections. Models must be able to take breaks and receive a minimum wage for their work, studio management should not force models to perform specific sex acts or agree that they will perform any act on behalf of the models. Additionally, models should have access to a confidential reporting mechanism so they can notify law enforcement or other authorities about workplace violations.
Developing recommendations for the platforms themselves is even more nuanced. Killbride says that most if not all of the popular adult streaming platforms have stringent authentication requirements for creating accounts and specifically prohibit studio owners or anyone from accepting terms of service on behalf of someone else. In practice, though, the companies are not doing enough, HRW researchers claim, to offer 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, the researchers say. And, crucially, platforms should establish policies that enable 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 may confuse its users or technical complications that keep content creators say prevents them from being able to assert ownership of their accounts.
On top of everything else, the stakes are particularly high for account ownership issues, because the researchers found that studios often use “recycled” accounts—those that were authenticated and established by one cammer and then retained by a studio—to circumvent minimum age requirements and stream child sexual abuse material.
“We found that although the platforms are quite strict and have completely clear policies about not streaming kids, the studios do still manage to hire and stream children using fake IDs or, more commonly, recycled accounts,” Killbride says. “Our research was all with adults, but many people we talked to started streaming as kids 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 equitably also, simultaneously, protects other vulnerable populations. In this case, by allowing cammers to control and transfer their accounts and their followings, the adult streaming industry could also drastically reduce the prevalence of child sexual abuse material.
Source : Wired
