Cammin’. Cammin’. And I hope you like Cammin’, Too?: What Are Platforms Doing to Intimacy?

“There is an incentive from the Online Safety Act for platforms to err on the side of being too censorious to avoid fines.” - Dr Hanne Stegeman

When Parliament passed the Online Safety Act in 2025, much of the public debate focused on a seemingly simple (and laudable) objective: protecting children online. It is difficult to argue with that. Few people would object to making the internet a safer place for young people. But legislation, like algorithms, rarely delineates and discriminates as neatly as we hope. As governments demand stricter moderation, age verification and tougher platform rules, who bears the cost of making the internet safer? And what happens when the same systems designed to protect ‘vulnerable people’ also begin restricting the freedoms of consenting adults?

On this episode of The Great RomCon?, I spoke with Dr Hanne Stegeman from the University of Exeter, whose research explores how people experience intimacy online. We discussed everything from OnlyFans and pornography to cyberflashing, AI deepfakes, age verification and why platform moderation often says as much about politics as it does about technology. What emerged was a conversation less about sex than about power.

Do we crush personal liberty in pursuit of communal safety? An old philosophical question that technology has simply given a new facet to. One of the first things Hanne challenges is the assumption that online sex work is somehow a brand-new phenomenon born out of platforms like OnlyFans. "I've interviewed people who were camming in the 1990s," she tells me. "There was a lot of lag in the stream, enough to go out for a cigarette break waiting for a response, but it was possible." Dial-up internet attempting to facilitate intimacy at roughly the speed of a government IT system. Digital sex work has existed almost as long as the public internet itself. What has changed is not the activity, but its visibility to the wider public.

Platforms like OnlyFans have democratised content creation in much the same way YouTube democratised broadcasting, or Twitter with microblogging (it’s like, just Facebook statuses, right?). Entry barriers to content creation and distribution have fallen dramatically. The tools are cheaper and access to global audiences is available. It’s the meritocracy of the internet age: If your content is good enough, anyone ‘can go viral’, anyone can become ‘TikTok famous’. But democratisation does not necessarily mean equality (hear that, Andy Stevenson?).

"The long-tail phenomenon [of a normal distribution of any population data] applies here too," Hanne explains. Like YouTubers, influencers, bloggers or podcasters (sigh…), a handful of creators become enormously successful while the vast majority earn relatively modest incomes. Attention, like capital in the wider economy, remains unequally distributed. There is a joke that OnlyFans is becoming one of Britain’s few genuine growth industries. Yet behind the bordy humour sits a serious labour market, where there is a clear consumer demand being met. We regularly debate employment protections for ‘gig workers’ like musicians, Uber drivers or Deliveroo riders, but comparatively little attention has been paid to the labour conditions of online sex workers whose livelihoods depend entirely upon opaque platform rules.

That opacity worries Hanne. "There is an incentive from the Online Safety Act for platforms to err on the side of being too censorious to avoid fines," she says. "A lot of platforms class all sorts of things as soliciting when they're not." The consequence is that legal sexual expression increasingly collides with automated moderation systems intended to avoid ‘harms’. One sex worker Hanne interviewed had her Instagram account removed with virtually no explanation or right of appeal. The account wasn't simply a social media profile; it was her primary source of income.

Moderation, like choice architecture, is never neutral. As Hanne points out, the groups most affected are often those already operating at society's margins. "Marginalised groups, women, sex workers and queer communities are more adversely affected by platform moderation." Algorithms designed to eliminate harmful sexual content often end up suppressing legitimate sexual expression instead. Even relatively "vanilla" users now might find themselves wondering: "How do I perform a version of my identity, be that playful sexiness for example, online without getting banned?"

In the realm of those looking for love online, technology has transformed courtship into a kind of socialised performance. Instagram, TikTok and dating apps have all become stages on which attractiveness is curated, edited and endlessly optimised. “All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players”, remarked Shakespeare as he uploaded his profile onto Hinge, tired of the wenches of Stratford. We now spend considerable energy constructing digital versions of ourselves, our rose-tinted avatar, carefully balancing a kind of authenticity (“‘You’ is a very fluid concept right now” as Will Smith quipped to a client in Hitch) against algorithmic visibility.

But who decides what constitutes acceptable desire - ‘who guards the guards’ of online discourse? The sharp decline in UK traffic to pornography websites like Pornhub following implementation of the Online Safety Act was widely reported as evidence of its success, but Dr Stegeman was less sure. "The drop in traffic doesn't actually tell us very much," she explains. "The aim of the legislation is to stop young people accessing pornography, so we don't know whether it's actually being effective."

Statistics, it seems, can flatter policy - there are ‘lies, damn lies, and statistics’, after all. Traffic falling tells us remarkably little about who stopped visiting, whether children simply found ways around restrictions using VPNs, or whether adults have actually changed their browsing habits. More fundamentally, we discussed whether another objective covertly sits beneath the legislation. Is there an unspoken moral ambition to reduce adults' consumption of pornography altogether? Debates around online safety often become entwined with debates around morality. Not just: Is this harmful? But: Should respectable adults be doing this at all?

My conversation with Dr Stegman then moved towards age verification, another cornerstone of current online safety proposals and debate. At first glance, requiring proof of age seems entirely sensible. Until you ask how - not how do you enforce it, but how do you know how old someone is online. "Age verification online is very different from showing ID in a bar," Hanne points out. "There are big privacy concerns."

Unlike handing a physical driving licence to a bartender for five seconds, online verification frequently involves uploading highly personal information to companies most people have never heard of, with a concern that your data could be then sold or hacked. Ironically, protecting children may require adults to surrender some of the most intimate data they possess. Liberty versus security. The dichotomy and trade-off has become digital.

The Government has also floated banning social media entirely for under-16s. Again, Hanne remains unconvinced. "Blanket bans can stop children accessing educational and helpful content," she argues. "We'll expect them to become digitally literate at the same time." We would never suggest teaching someone to drive by banning cars until they turned eighteen. Learning how to navigate digital spaces safely presumably requires spending time within them, if in a regulated environment with a trusted instructor.

Of course, none of this means the internet is harmless, a libertarian playground.  One area where Hanne is unequivocal concerns non-consensual sexual content, such as deepfake pornography, revenge porn and cyberflashing. These, she argues, should be clearly separated from consensual adult sexual expression. "Non-consensual material shouldn't be out there." Returning to discussions of power rather than sex, Hanne interprets cyberflashing, the sending of unsolicited intimate images to someone, is less as a sexual behaviour, than as social domination. "This is mainly about power rather than sexuality," she says. "That I can violate your consent or your space." Technology, in this instance, has not created a new human impulse. It has merely supplied a more efficient delivery mechanism.

The same applies to AI-generated deepfake pornography. While generative AI can create astonishing images, it can also manufacture sexual content featuring people who never consented to participate. Celebrities, former partners and ordinary individuals now find themselves digitally undressed without permission - look at the trouble caused to schoolgirls by the app ‘ClothOff’ as an example. Perhaps the technology is new. But the abuse of power is not, it, as the saying goes, ‘comes as no surprise’.

Towards the end of our discussion, we explored pornography's broader influence on relationships. Public debate often swings between two extremes: the ubiquitous availability and apparent demand for pornography is either harmless entertainment or civilisation-ending moral collapse, evidence that we have reached end of Rome/Soddom and Gomorrah-levels of civic bankruptcy. Hanne worries less about pornography existing than pornography becoming sex education.  Young people increasingly encounter explicit material before receiving meaningful relationship education. "We shouldn't confuse porn with educational material," she says. "There should be alternatives." No one learns to drive by watching ‘The Fast and the Furious’ - (except me, of course… still, I just about passed my test). Yet we sometimes expect adolescents to understand intimacy after consuming highly stylised adult entertainment produced for commercial purposes rather than education.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing digital intimacy is not technology itself but the incentives underpinning it. Platforms are designed to maximise engagement: attention generates advertising, advertising generates revenue. As Hanne acknowledges, those capitalist incentives are difficult to escape. At one point, I jokingly suggested nationalising OnlyFans. Storm the tech summer palaces of Palo Alto, comrades. Seize the means of production of adult material. You have nothing to lose but your clothes. Perhaps let’s sort out the water sector and the trains first, eh Andy Burnham?

Talking to Hanne left me reflecting that arguments about online sexuality are rarely just about sex. They are fundamental discussions about freedom, privacy and consent. About who gets to decide what counts as ‘acceptable’ intimacy and eroticism. Technology has undoubtedly expanded opportunities for connection, creativity and expression. But it has also amplified the possibilities of exploitation, inequality and abuse for some. The challenge is ensuring we do not solve one problem by creating another. Somewhere between protecting children, preserving privacy and respecting adult autonomy lies a balance we are struggling to find. Desire is the crucible, the most distilled proof, of want. As our romantic lives continue migrating onto digital platforms, it is a balance that will shape not only what we see online - but who gets to express desire, to want, anything at all.