State Attorney Amit Aisman last week struck down a request issued by Israeli NGOs to examine whether adult-content website OnlyFans violates Israeli law, N12 reported.
Aisman rejected the request sent by the Task Force on Human Trafficking and Prostitution (TFHT) and the Jerusalem Institute for Justice’s (JIJ) request to act against the online platform.
However, Aisman said he is willing to consider taking action against OnlyFans in the future, N12 said, as long as well-substantiated cases of legal violations are brought forth.
On Thursday, TFHT and JIJ had called on Aisman to proactively request that OnlyFans disclose “clarifications of its activities,” asking him to take steps to ensure that women and minors are not being sexually abused or trafficked through the site.
"Where there are cumulative, well-founded, and consistent indications of the existence of patterns of abuse, there is an obligation to examine the platform at the systemic level as well as at the individual level," the organizations' CEOs and lawyers wrote to Aisman, per N12.
According to N12, the request detailed similar cases from around the world, where indictments were filed against the platform following suspicions of sexual abuse and exploitation of women and minors.
TFHT later confirmed N12’s report in a Saturday post to the organization’s social media, noting that “OnlyFans is not a ‘social platform for creating content,’ but a prostitution ring in every sense of the word.”
"The platform is a sprawling space for modern online pimping and the exploitation of minors without hindrance, under the glittering cover of 'sexual content,’” TFHT Director Moriah Rodel Silfan said to N12.
Silfan added that currently, there is no way to enforce guidelines on OnlyFans or protect Israeli women and minors from sexual exploitation while the platform’s owners “amass huge fortunes.”
The request follows MK Pnina Tamano-Shata (Blue and White) recently presenting a bill against online prostitution that would ban the purchase of photographed, filmed, or live-streamed sexual content.
Israel has no legislation for banning online prostitution
According to N12, an attorney from the Cyber Department of the Attorney-General's Office had told the organizations in March that they could not prove that OnlyFans is a site only used to advertise prostitution services, explaining that Israel has no clear legislation recognizing online acts as prostitution under the law.
Because of this, the attorney explained, the A-G’s Office did not file orders to block the website or ask OnlyFans to remove illegal content from the site, claiming the “difficulty of locating the content on the site as prohibited conduct sometimes occurs in closed chats.”
N12 noted that TFHT and JIJ had, in response, sent the A-G’s Office the findings of an investigation published by Reuters two years ago, which pointed to over 120 complaints filed in the United States claiming that sexual content had been published on the platform without consent.
Rotem Ben Simhon, head of JIJ’s legal department, told N12 that "regulation lags behind reality, and platforms are exploiting the vacuum to operate almost without supervision.”
“This is not just a question of freedom of expression, but of responsibility towards those on the vulnerable side of the system. The State of Israel has already recognized the harms of prostitution, so there is no reason to turn a blind eye when it moves online."