Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Everyone’s Lying About Lil Tay OnlyFans w/ Kat Tenbarge

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co A few days ago, 18 year old social media star Lil Tay made over $1 million by launching an OnlyFans shortly after her 18th birthday. The launch generated a massive backlash online, people on the left and the right are calling for OnlyFans to be banned and for the criminalization of porn. On today's free speech Friday Kat Tenbarge and I break down Lil Tay's rise, what actually went down with her OF launch, and how this viral moment is already being weaponized by both influential Democrat and far right accounts to silence speech, dismantle civil liberties and push dangerous censorship laws that would lead to even more exploitation of women and children. Follow me:https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzhttps://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

The ultimate goal here of this sort of moral panic is just to re-entrench and uphold the ability to control women and strip women's autonomy from them. Welcome back to Free Speech Friday, my series where I cover the fight for free expression, privacy, and civil rights online. A few days ago, 18-year-old social media star Lil Tay made over $1 million by launching an Onlyfans account shortly after her 18th birthday. Even though she apparently only posted safe for work content to her page, the launch generated a massive backlash online. People on the left and the right are now calling for OnlyFans to be banned and for the criminalization of porn. On today's free speech Friday, I want to talk about Lil Taze's rise up to this point, what actually went down with her OnlyFans launch, and how this viral moment is already being weaponized to silence speech, dismantle civil liberties, and push dangerous censorship laws that would lead to even,

even more exploitation of women and children online. To do this, I have Kat Ten Barge here. Kat is an amazing journalist who covers misogyny and the internet on her newsletter, Spitfire News. Hi, Kat. Welcome to Free Speech Friday. Hi, Taylor. Thanks so much for having me.

To start off, I want to back up a little bit. And for people that don't know or forgot, because it was kind of a while ago, I want to explain, like, who Lil Tay is. Lil Tay is. Lil Tay first came onto my radar back in 2018. I wrote this big piece for the Atlantic called the Lil Tay saga. reaches its logical conclusion. But I feel like I had first seen her videos go viral on Instagram.

She was known as the youngest flexor on Instagram, and she was basically cosplaying as like a nine-year-old rapper, sitting in a bathtub, rolling around in fake money. Yes, the like most visceral memories I have of her from the very beginning are youngest flexor of the century and her being in a parking garage where she's surrounded by like luxury cars. She's getting out of the car. She's like throwing money around.

and people were obviously taking it as a meme as a joke, but there were also a lot of questions of like, who is this child and how did she get this money and is any of this real? It's so funny because the videos that she was doing back then, I feel like today wouldn't be considered controversial, but I think back in 2017 and 2018, we just were beginning to see the explosion

of the influencer economy go mainstream. And we were seeing a lot of the first generation of like true child influencers where, like, they were gaining attention on their own social media accounts outside of family channels and, like, really becoming famous kind of for doing pranks or trolls or whatever. Yeah, it was kind of a perfect time for her rise because I feel like part of the gimmick and the confusion is that people were like, who is behind the Lill-Tay account? Like, is it actually this nine-year-old child or, like, is someone else running the account?

And then things started to trickle out, kind of exposing what was really happening. I broke that story, actually, that it was actually Jason, her 16-year-old brother, who was really behind Lil Tays rise and sort of orchestrated her rise to fame. This was a Kim Star obsessed, like YouTube obsessed teenager, basically, who wanted to go viral. This was like peak prank YouTube. So everything that was like ostentage, like offensive, garish, like was doing well online. I mean, he had tried to actually, I think like work for Keem Star or something. Keem Star was the host of drama alert. Like he was just this like super YouTube pilled kid

and he saw his younger sister and was like, let me make her viral basically. She's my ticket to fame. I remember when you broke that story because it was such a viral obsession and it was such a like satisfying reveal to know that there was someone behind it, but it's also so sad.

Like I think from the get-go, I was always like, this is a very clear cut case of like, there's a level of exploitation here, and the more that you reported on it, the more clear that became. She had a big feud. I don't know if you remember as well with like the cash me outside girl, Danielle Bregoli and WoVicki. There was this whole sort of cadre of like young influencers coming up.

She was the youngest. Like I think those girls were maybe 13, 14. But it was all this sort of like next generation kids leveraging the internet to just like get lots of attention. And yeah, it was bleak. So what ended up coming out about Lil Tay, largely in my story and elsewhere, is that, like, Jason, her brother had sort of pushed her into fame. Her mother, Angela, did not speak any English. She was the daughter of this, like, very messy

divorce. The father was in Canada. The mom had moved to L.A. at, like, Jason's behest, basically, and they were all living together while Jason sort of, like, bullied the mom and bullied Lill Tay into making content. That, you know, sort of went on for a little while, and then finally the father got involved, legally forced Lil Taye to move back home to Canada and was like, okay, that's enough. You need to be off the internet and you need to be back in school. Yeah. And it's fascinating like that in recent years, there was a period of time where I feel like people kind of forgot about Lil Tay.

Like I certainly was not thinking about her actively. But then all of this drama over the past couple of years like resurfaces in a really big way. She kind of fell off the map for years and like COVID hit. and frankly, like, entire new generations of influencers were born. And then in August 2023, there was a post made to her Instagram account that basically claimed her half-brother Jason had died. This was later confirmed to be like a hack.

People were sort of unclear whether it was a publicity stunt because it sort of got people talking again and it got Lil Tay back in the spotlight. And suddenly it was like, wait a minute, is somebody on her account? Did her brother really die? like what's happening. She went from being kind of like a short-lived meme back in like 2018 to a few years later, the narrative just becomes like it's again like who is behind all of this because every time she resurfaces in the public eye, it's some sort of viral stunt. And a lot of times it's like a death hoax. So that was August 2023 and then September 2023 is when she like really

reemerges. I don't know if you remember, but she was doing these like long Instagram lives. It was really chaotic. She was sort of calling people out. And then she released her first single music called Sucker for Green in September 2023. And that sort of ended this five-year hiatus off the internet that she had had. And she basically tried to reemerge as like a pop star and shot this elaborate music video and seemed to be kind of maybe like entering into the music industry. It's so unfortunate, but that song was such an earworm for me. I watched it when it came out and I was like, it was one of those things. I was like, I couldn't get out of my head.

And like, even right now, I'm like, I could sing that song, which is so unfortunate because it's not a good song. But I also remember when it came out and like watching the music video, my thought as well was I was like, they're really adultifying her. Like, she's still a teenage girl, but she was wearing like outfits that pushed the line, like towed the line of what was age appropriate. And I didn't make any comment on it at the time because I feel like discourse around this always is just like harmful to the child because it always becomes like shaming the child,

like sexualizing the child. But it was a very clear trajectory of this exploitation that you saw from the very beginning. Like she was being objectified and she was this product. And even the song, Sucker for Green, is about that. That's like literally what the song is about. Yeah, it was really weird. And I think a lot of people were kind of like wondering like, again, who is behind this? what is happening. There wasn't really a lot of explanation. It was sort of her back on Instagram

live saying all this stuff about her father. And then we have September 2024 where Lil Tate's social media accounts announced that she's been hospitalized with a heart tumor. She allegedly underwent open heart surgery of removing a growth. And then following that experience, she released another single titled Growing Up in 2024, which didn't do as well. No, I feel like it was truly like a boy cried wolf scenario where, at that point there had been multiple sort of viral hoaxes where it was like, my brother is dead, like, Lil Te is dead. Like this narrative got slayed out to the point where it was not like getting them the attention anymore.

I think she or whoever she's working with realized that like basically these hoaxes are not hitting the way that they used to. And that sort of brings us to now. That's all 2024. It's August 2025. And Little Tay has turned 18 and launched an only fans account. She said that she recorded the content at 12.1 a.m. on her 18th birthday and within three hours had made over a million dollars, which she says broke, you know, OnlyFans records in terms of how fast she was able to generate money. And this has caused so much controversy online. I mean, like people have been yelling about it. I don't know, Kat. Like I got like 30 texts about this when it happened. Yes, same. And I also got texts leading up to it happening because she was teasing it in advance. And like in the weeks leading up to her 18th birthday, she was posting stuff like, should I launch an only fans when I turn 18? And a lot of people were like sending me those tweets and posts that she was making being like, is this really happening?

And I was like, probably, but I hope not. But it seems like, yeah, that's going to be the next big like one-time stunt narrative that they're going to pull. And it's unclear even today whether she's like working with management, what's going on? how if her brother, half-brother is still involved. Like, you know, we don't know. She's certainly an adult now. She can do what she wants. But the reason I want to talk about this on Free Speech Friday,

because it might seem like a little bit random, is because of the backlash that it generated. And that backlash is coming right as the United Kingdom rolled out these horrible age verification laws that were really predicated on cracking down on adult content and porn content. We're just overwhelmingly seeing this moral panic about porn and only fans. et cetera, used to strip our civil liberties on the internet. Kat, I don't know if you saw some of these tweets I messaged you.

This Democrat DNC meme account quote posted the news about Lil Tai and said, I'm pretty liberal about what I think the rules of internet sex work should be, but there should be laws about child influencers and porn. Again, she is not a child influencer. She is an adult. And if you want to read like that next one that I sent. So this one comes from like this big blue check account. and it says, Lil Tay launched an OnlyFans on her 18th birthday and made over one million in just three hours.

Only fans must be banned. Yeah, that post got hundreds of thousands of likes and it reached over 40 million people and counting. And then that big Blue Check account also quote tweeted it again and said, OnlyFans is the all caps worst thing on earth. The industry has lied to you for years and you never noticed a thread. And then it's a thread of a bunch of red-pilled BS. I want to talk to you about all this because I think a lot of people saw this. They were sort of horrified, right, by this, like, you know, this very tragic situation of this young girl.

But their response is not to criticize the men, criticize the patriarchy, criticize the systems that sort of led to this. But it is to ban only fans, the platform that has enabled basically safe sex work for millions of people and to censor women off the internet. You're seeing a lot of this, like, women shouldn't be allowed to do porn until they turn 21. And it's always women, by the way. They never talk about men. And this really reactionary rhetoric. So I'm wondering kind of like, what have you been seeing? There's sort of the knee-jerk reaction from the left and the knee-jerk reaction from the right.

But they're the same. They're ultimately the same sort of bias and stigma. But it's like you go back to that first tweet that said, we need laws around child influences and porn. This is such a common response to seeing some sort of exploitation of women. And my ultimate response, like the first thing I always think is we already have laws. around child influencers and porn. It is already illegal for someone under the age of 18

to make porn. That's not the problem. The problem is partially that when young women in particular are exploited, there is oftentimes no accountability for the perpetrators of these crimes. Like, the laws oftentimes already exist. They are just not enforced. And part of the reason that they're not enforced

is because there's all this cultural momentum around condemning, typically the girl or young woman herself versus holding perpetrators of grooming and sexual violence accountable. I totally agree. And I thought this other post from an actual sex worker was really good. She posted, the problem with Lil Tay starting in OnlyFans at 18 is not that OnlyFans exist. It's a platform that gives creators safety and control

that they otherwise wouldn't have. It's that we fetishize youth and don't socially correct men who sexually prey on young women. She follows it up below with a tweet. I've been in the sex industry for 13 years since I was a teenager. If you really want there to be less OnlyFans accounts and you're worried about abuse and exploitation, the answer is strong social safety nets and economic restructuring. And I thought that this was a really good point that, like, of course, got zero, you know, real meaningful engagement on Twitter. But like, OnlyFans is this platform that actually changed the dynamics of sex work for millions of women specifically, where they were previously working at strip clubs.

I mean, I went to college in Colorado and there were multiple girls I knew that were working at strip clubs at the age of 18 in order to pay their bills or, you know, engaging in unsafe forms of sex work, IRL. Only fans really changed the power dynamic. It also flipped the power dynamics in the porn industry where it gave women autonomy and it gave women and men any all sex workers the ability to kind of have agency over their own image, over their own kind of like boundaries, all of this stuff. So I would say it's like quite a positive development. And I think there's a reason why they're targeting that because you don't hear these same people saying, well, why are 18 year olds working at strip clubs? Again, I think that they would try to criminalize that as well. But that sort of seem as acceptable. But when a woman makes a million dollars for herself on her 18th birthday, that's what should be criminalized.

Yes. And it's so clear that the biggest issue, like that tweet that specifically said, like she made a million dollars in three hours. only fans must be banned, it is no accident that they're linking her ability to create wealth from this platform autonomously to the idea that the platform should be banned. Because these people are not anti-sexual exploitation of women and girls. They just don't want women and girls to be able to make that choice for themselves or crucially to be able to profit from it. And I was thinking sort of when we talk about L'Lte and how earlier we were talking about how she feuded with these other young influencers like WoVicki and Danielle Bregoli, the bad baby Cash Me Outside

Girl. Recently, Danielle Bregoli talked about how at the height of her fame as a child, she was groomed and preyed upon and in relationships with adult men around her at that time. And you don't see really any outrage around that, even though, like, that is what happens to young women so commonly. And that is like the root of this desire. for people to purchase Lil Taze OnlyFans content, like the second she turns 18, is like it's this much broader systemic issue of abuse. And the thing about OnlyFans is that it is not only like a way for women to actually profit autonomously from that fetishization of youth, but it's also happening out in the open,

whereas people would prefer this type of abuse and predation to happen behind closed doors because that way they don't have to see it and they don't have to think about it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, Danielle Bregoli also launched an only fan. She made a million dollars in the first six hours, and she's so far earned $75 million from her only fans account. That doesn't excuse the abuse that she went through when she was younger. But like you said, Kat, I think there's this anger when women sees economic control, right? Or when they turn 18 and they start to kind of make these decisions. Like, do I think that she's making these decisions in the best headspace? Like, do I love that she's like doing it right at her 18th They know, but again, like I said, I mean, I had friends in college that like they turned 18 and went to the strip club because they knew that they could make money. And we have this fetishization of youth as well where like the same people posting this are also posting things that like, you know, women need to have kids as young as possible. Their eggs are drying up. Like they're the one posting like all of this like ages red pill bullshit all day online. And so it's like they fetishize youth.

They built this entire culture around kind of like, you. young girls and the exploitation of young girls. But when a young girl actually starts to benefit economically from that, that's when they have the problem. Exactly. And I noticed when I was reading the replies to these types of tweets, there were a lot of people like sort of espousing this rhetoric, a lot of men in the comments who were basically saying like, the problem isn't that her only fan's content exists. The problem is that men are paying for it. Because there's this really common refrain that basically is like you're less of a man, you're less masculine if you pay for porn. You should be stealing porn, essentially. And any sex worker who you talk to will talk about

this massive, massive issue, which is that frequently like their content gets stolen and disseminated across the web for free, which takes away their income. And so they're not even mad about the existence of this material. There's a reason why one of the most popular categories of porn is women who are 18, 19, 20, barely legal, as it's called. That is such a popular category of porn. The problem is they don't want those women to profit from it. They want to be able to essentially steal that and use it as a tool of exploitation purely. I think there's also this like deep paternalism and this moral panic around porn. Obviously, we're seeing it happen right now in the UK and in the US where it's being used to strip our civil liberties, right? Like this is the reason why the UK rolled out age

verification, which is all about tying your off-light identity to your online behavior, you now have to scan your face to use Spotify and YouTube and all of these platforms. We're seeing mass censorship, you know, where you're seeing basically entire subreddits about abortion, reproductive justice, R-slash periods is censored in the UK. And actually, all of the information about sexual abuse and child's exploitation is also censored. So if you are a young person being abused because of these age verification laws, you now can't even find basic information to get help. you can't even contextualize or understand your abuse because you can't access that quote unquote adult material. And this is something that's been a bipartisan effort.

And I've been covering this a lot on my Free Speech Friday series of like this, like the Democrats and Republicans, this moral panic about social media and porn that's being used to dismantle our rights. And I think it's so disgusting and telling that this DNC meme account that literally was like with Kamala Harris, you know, recently. Like it is like this account like the person that runs it is in the upper echelons of Democratic politics is, tweeting this and then defending it, saying, you know, I obviously like went back after it. And I was like, by the way, 18 year olds aren't children. And, you know, you're arguing that like they shouldn't be allowed to do this. But and yet they can like blow their body up in the military. You know, like this is ridiculous. And then he says, yes, but the following you amass as a child influencer immediately being turned sexual the moment you turn 18 is going to allow for pretty insidious

exploitation at scale. What the hell is that even talking about? It's so frustrating to me because I'm like, where have you been? Like, well before only fans existed, the sexualization of celebrity women and girls who are 16, 17, 18 has been a widespread issue that particularly men have profited off of four decades, lest we forget that Emma Watson and countless other, like, girls, 17-year-old girls who were famous. Radio stations would have countdown clocks airing till the moment they turned 18. There is a storied history of paparazzi, standing outside their 18th birthday parties, laying on the ground, cameras facing up,

so that they can snap shots underneath their skirts and dresses. Like, this exploitation of 17-year-old female celebrities and influencers has always existed. It will not stop existing if we ban porn or ban only fans. It will just take their ability to monetize it away from them and make sure that only men, predatory men in the media, can monetize it. Exactly.

And I think it's so disgusting. and insidious that this is coming from Democrats. This is coming from a democratic account that says, yeah, I'm pretty liberal, right? You're not pretty liberal, actually. You're actually pretty fucking reactionary because the stuff that you're pushing is far right and reactionary rhetoric

that strips women of agency. And like you said, this account is not getting morally outraged about the patriarchy. It's not tweeting about the exploitation of women. It's not saying, hey, why do we fetishize and sexualize youth more broadly among women? why if you go to the comments on my YouTube page, although I try to monitor a lot of them, most of them are like, you're old, right?

Or they have all these weird age conspiracies where like people are claiming like, you're actually, you're secretly 45, you're secretly 47, or like, you're secretly older than we think. And that somehow makes you irrelevant as a woman. That's the culture that we need to fight back against. And of course, these like Democrat meme accounts or these other influencers, like they have nothing to say about that because like you said, they're fine with the broader system. They just don't like when women are able to, you know, hold their own power or gain economic control over their own experiences.

And this is all happening, of course, against this backdrop of things like the Kids Online Safety Act. There are 11 states so far in America that have passed some version of, you know, age verification legislation. And of course, Project 2025, which wants to strip all women of our civil liberties and rights. Yes. And it really blows my mind that you will have these exact same people talk. about Project 2025, and you have to question whether they have any idea what they're talking about, because I have not read Project 2025 in its entirety. I know it's like a thousand pages long, but I have searched for all of the sections that have to do with porn. I've searched for all

the sections that have to do with trans people and with women's rights. And it takes you like 10 minutes to read through, and it is spelled out very, very clearly and explicitly that their plan that is in action that is already happening and has already had massive consequences, is to take porn, criminalize porn, and then associate not only sex workers who do not deserve to be criminalized, but also to associate trans people, LGBTQ people, women's rights organizations, sexual education, associate all these things under this label of pornography, and then criminalize it so that nobody can access it. Like, that is the plan that has been the plan. And yet you have people who purport to be Democrats who purport to be anti-project 2025 signing up and ensuring that these

things come to pass. Yeah. And it's, you know, I think back to my interview last year with higher I check from lips of TikTok when I was asking her about trans rights and all this stuff, and she can barely defend her own ideology in that interview. But she showed me porn. Like she, you know, and she was sort of like, this is what, you know, kids are being exposed to, da-da-da. And it was actually, I think it was some sort of educational sort of sexual material that she ultimately was like having problem with in a school. But, you know, these are the same groups that don't want kids to have sexual education. They don't want women to understand their own bodies. Again, R slash periods is banned for anyone under the age of 18 now in the UK on Reddit.

And I just want people to understand, like, how connected all of this is. Because, like, I think all of us rightfully, like, see what happened with Little Taye and we're like, oh, this poor girl. Like, obviously she has been through so much emotional trauma with, her parents divorce, the exploitation from her brother, the, like, being pumped into the entertainment ecosystem. Like, women are all women, all influencers, entertainers, actors, like women in Hollywood and women in entertainment are constantly exploited. But the moral panic is never around that exploitation.

And we're not doing anything to fix the system. And I also think of, you know, especially with this Democrat meme account tweeting, like, you know, we need laws for child influencers in porn. We have a lot of laws around porn. But as I've written about these laws protecting quote-unquote child influencers also don't protect child influencers. And according to child exploitation efforts will lead to more exploitation because nobody can now report on child abuse online because of these laws, quote-unquote, protecting child influencers coming out of these reactionary states like Utah. It shows the ignorance that these people have as well where, and I talked about these child influencer laws in a separate video on my YouTube channel where I did like a deep dive and I wrote a 7,000 word sort of takedown of these laws. but they want to sort of like feel like they're doing something

and they want to pass these like reactionary, restrictive, horrible laws, like Sesta Fasta is another example, obviously on a federal level, that did enormous harm to women and to sex workers. But then they can sort of like run around claiming that they're liberal and that they are like, you know, I don't know, making the internet quote unquote like a safer space. Sesta Fasta and internet censorship is like, if you understand it, you feel like you are being gaslit

by the entire world because it is so bad and it has been happening for so long. And we have all the data. We know all the consequences of this types of legislation. And there have been real victims of child sex trafficking, like child victims of human trafficking, numerous survivors of assault of abuse, numerous sex workers who have survived, like unethical and abusive situations. All of those people will tell you these legislations do the exact opposite of what people say they will do. They are not just ineffective. They make everything worse.

Sesta Fasta. made sex trafficking worse. It made it harder for law enforcement to track down what was going on. It did not save anyone, literally, like zero people were saved or rescued from sex trafficking. It's all just like a fantasy.

And despite that, despite having the record of what a failure this legislation was, which also, by the way, made spaces on the internet that were beloved spaces of, like, queer and sexual expression, like Tumblr, made it impossible for those types of things to flourish on there.

like hurt a generation of queer kids and women and minorities. All of that already happened. And despite that failure, you now have this massive push for things like COSA, which is like even worse. And people who people don't know about this and they're shocked when it happens. But then you also have people who do know about this who will still trumpet this horn, people who are Democrats, who will say like, we are protecting kids, like we are holding big tech accountable.

Meanwhile, this is what big tech wants. Yes. is a gift to big tech. And it's just so maddening. Yeah, it's wild how you see this rhetoric and frankly, this anti-porn rhetoric from leftists. Like this other person in the thread that I was fighting with on Twitter, of course, like has the rose emoji in the bio. And you hear these people, too, saying, like, well, I want to crack down on big tech.

Like, I want to, you know, I think tech is bad. And I think a lot of these people on the left have such a rudimentary understanding of technology and the internet. And they almost have like worse. media literacy, I would say, than the boomers around some of this stuff, because it is, as you said, a massive gift to big tech, age verification, quote unquote, online safety laws, all of that. What it does is it gives the platforms basically carte blanche to censor anything that they want in the name of protecting children.

And it mandates that they collect even more data. These predatory tech platforms would love to be able to harvest unlimited amounts of data on children, including biometric data, you know, location data, like all of this detailed information, not just on children, but on everyone. And these laws mandate that that happens. Also, who do you think is running these age verification schemes? It's Peter Thiel's companies. It's Palantir.

It's like what I can't remember the name of the other age verification startup that Peter Teal invested in, but it is big tech. It is Silicon Valley billionaires. They are investing very heavily right now into the surveillance state. And things like the Kids Online Safety Act, age verification, all of this stuff. That is a further expansion of this surveillance state that these billionaires are building. So you are an absolute moron if you think that you are somehow, you know, fighting against big tech by backing things like age verification. You are giving a multi-billion dollar gift to Peter Thiel and to the worst, most evil Silicon Valley billionaires.

A hundred percent. And it's like when you look at age verification and internet censorship, there are like layers of sort of illiteracy around multiple different issues at play here. Because there's also this idea that criminalization and involving law enforcement with victims of abuse and exploitation is going to help them, when in reality it does the exact opposite. And you go back and you look at examples from decades past, like street sex workers. When street sex workers encounter the police, the police do not come in to save them. The police come in to further sexually abuse and exploit them. And like there is so much information about this. information firsthand from sex workers who have lived these various experiences who do not want to be on the street who would be safer behind a computer screen being able to have a platform like only fans

who will talk about this at length. People completely ignore them and they revert back to this just world theory where it's like we need the cops, we need the government to protect women and girls when living under like Donald Trump's second administration should disabuse any and everyone of that notion that like the government is going to protect. you. The other thing is, like, lest you need any more examples of how backwards legislation like COSA is, Elon Musk and Linda Yakorino were both completely on board with COSA last year, despite X being the cesspool that it is. And I remember talking to a mother, a former journalist who is one of the, like, pro-internet censorship advocates supposedly on the left. And I asked her,

like how can you be essentially collaborating with someone like Elon Musk? And like, how do you think that you both have the same shared goals? And something she said to me was like, I've learned that from getting into politics, you will make very strange bedfellows. And I'm like, no, what that means is that you are now in bed with the right. Like you think that you're using them to achieve your goals when in reality you are being used by the right to achieve their goals.

And I feel like that is such an undercurrent of so much of what is happening at like the federal and state level of government right now is like the left thinks that the right is operating in good faith. When in reality, like the right is laughing in all of our faces as they use these people on the left to do exactly what they said they were going to do in product 2025. Exactly. It is so depressing how kind of like bipartisan all of this is. And I think that's also because a lot of people on the left have spent years. just chugging this moral panic bullshit about social media. And they sort of can only understand like social media or platforms like only fans or whatever. They're like, hmm, capitalism bad. Ban the apps because capitalism bad.

Like it's frankly incoherent ideology because, you know, in large part the internet is also like, especially the open web is actually quite liberatory. Like, you know, we want free expression. We want people to be able, like we want a flourishing independent media ecosystem. Like the reason that they're. trying to ban all of this stuff and enact mass censorship is because the internet is so liberatory. And because it has ushered in social justice movements, it has connected the world. And it is allowing young people to become even more informed.

I always come back to this thought whenever people talk about how harmful the internet is, where it's like, if it were not for the internet, I know that I, as someone like who grew up online, who grew up on Tumblr, that is where I learned feminist. thought. That is where I learned about LGBTQ identity. If I did not have those internet platforms, I do not know who I would be today. I don't know if I would be living like my authentic free self. And that to me is so frightening. Like the thought of if I had never been exposed to feminism, if I had never been exposed to like queer culture and queer identity. And that is exactly why Marsha Blackburn says like we are going to get the porn off the internet so that kids

stop being transgender. Like they just say it out. loud and I feel like so many people on the left also don't think it will come back to affect them. They view themselves as like on some neutral ground that is so far removed from the consequences of all of this and when their content actually starts to get censored and they can't find things anymore, it's like, why is this happening? Like what why did this happen? And I'm like because simple cause and effect. If anyone thinks that like they are somehow immune from the consequences of internet censorship or like

these broader anti-porn sentiments, like, you are so sorely mistaken. And it just, like, it shows such a lack of also historical literacy because I think back to how, and this is still an ongoing thing. Like, sex education is not, like, a widespread accessible thing. And I think about how, like, in religious environments, they will literally take human anatomy me textbooks and they will cover up like women's anatomy so that children can't see it because that's considered porn. And that is exactly what is happening on the internet right now. And people don't think it affects them. Yes. And these dumbass people, especially these like liberals and

leftists. And I really take issue with them because I'm like, you're supposed to be on the right side of this, right? And you have aligned yourself with these with these far right reactionaries that are like pro patriarchy. They need to realize that like what is considered adult content is completely arbitrary. And we're seeing this again, like in the UK now so explicitly. But yeah, all LGBTQ content will be adults. Like anything that they don't like is quote unquote adult content. And I do think that certain leftists have started to grasp this with like Israel and Palestine where they're like, huh, why can't I say the word Gaza or like, why am I getting censored? It's like, okay, yes. Now take that and extrapolate that out and realize that this system that

you're sort of either complacently going along with or even advocating for it, like is the reason that this is happening. And I think that's what all. bothers me about like when I see these left is pushing this reactionary rhetoric about social media, the moral panic. It's the Jonathan Haidt stuff. There is another super viral tweet from this guy, again, rose emoji in bio that says, every parent really does need to be telling every other parent that you got to not give them a phone until high school and have a game plan for limiting short form video online. That really is the entire ballgame right now. Basically, it's just talking about like how you need to restrict kids internet access and get kids off the internet don't give them a phone until high school like

it's just absurd because we know actually that kids that get smartphones earlier have better mental health i wrote about this like we have actual like data that shows that's the primary way that young people use smartphones is to text message and connect with friends and i'm not advocating for kids to have unlimited screen time to watch like youtube slot videos but we need to teach kids to interact with technology and there's this massive like effort again along with this age verification stuff to keep kids ignorant like they don't want kids to have a phone they don't want kids to have internet access they don't want kids on social media and then they want those kids to turn 18 and have just been mainlining government propaganda and you know right wing bullshit for 18 years and then vote you know

how they want them to vote which is certainly not progressive i think it's interesting like i haven't seen a lot of people make the connection that sesta foster and the impacts of internet censors based around things like sex trafficking and pornography has already had cascading effects in terms of making young people more conservative because they are not the same internet. Like, again, I think back to the internet that I grew up on, which was extremely left.

And I was constantly on a daily basis being exposed to radical feminism, like radical progressive politics. And they're not getting that to the degree that I was getting that. And a big part of that is because Sesta Fasta, like shut down so much of this important information online. And I really think that people just have lost their grasp on reality because I'm like,

do you think that in the United States today, kids are going to just be exposed to like high quality information about the world through traditional sources? Like you know that they're not. But I just feel like people are so captured by like the emotions behind this conversation and the fear mongering behind this. conversation that they are not actually like engaging with reality. Yeah and they've bought into this right wing campaign that is framed social media as a bad thing and destroying kids mental health and doing all these evils in the world. And then the leftists have sort of bought into that

again because they're against quote unquote big tech. But they're not really against big tech as we said. I mean another way that that age verification is a gift to big tech is that it ensures everything that you just talked about cat like those feminist spaces or I think of like these. disability justice forums, like when I became immunocompromise, like I found so much information from other people that were also trying to navigate the ongoing pandemic, like having no immune system and like, you know, learning about things and trading resources and finding affordable masks and tests and things like that. Like these are all happening in small communities that cannot afford to do age verification. The only companies that can afford, and every single tech

reporter has like confirmed this and talked about this, especially Mike Masnick of TechDert, has done a great series on this. The only companies that can afford this, massively expensive data harvesting machine, which is age verification, are going to be big tech companies. So the reason that meta and Google and Apple and all these big tech companies want age verification is because it automatically eliminates so much competition. You can't set up these small indie social communities or platforms online because you will not be able to do the level of age verification and data harvesting needed to keep it operational and to be compliant. So, you know, there's been so much talk, especially on the left of like, we have to get off, you know,

meta and like go on places like blue sky or whatever blue sky is barely going to be able to enact this like it is a it is a huge burden and if you think that we're going to get more indie web and a more independent less profit driven internet under this new system you are delusional yes no i was literally just thinking about blue sky and it's like you have a mix of people on there because there are some people who get this on there but overwhelmingly i would say people do not understand that like this platform that they have fled to to escape even Elon Musk. They are in support of legislation that Elon Musk loves because he's like, you're all going to have to come back because like platforms like Blue Sky aren't going to be able to

exist anymore because only platforms like X are going to be able to exist. Exactly. And I think Blue Sky has reached critical mass now that they've said that like they are doing a certification. This is why you can't DM someone on Blue Sky right now within the UK without verifying your age. But I'm talking about this small in the up and coming social platforms. Like and specifically social platforms cater to marginalized groups and communities. Again, like these disability forums, niche patient communities for rare diseases where people trade information about clinical trials, like support groups for victims of sexual assault or support groups. Like basically these social communities are built outside the bounds of big tech that are not

profit-driven communities. Many of these communities exist truly for the social good and to sort of help people. And they exist on this indie web that we should be like bolstering and enabling. And instead we're about to basically just put the ban hammer on all of it and prop up this tech monopoly that we have of a very few amount of companies that are going to be the only ones to really robustly do this. Absolutely. I think back to a piece that I did at NBC, literally the last piece I did before I got laid off was about COSA. And I interviewed me and my fellow reporter. We interviewed these teenagers and young adults who are so passionately like defending the internet

that they know and love against big tech, against COSA. And they were so, literate on these issues. They spoke so eloquently on these topics. And then I just remember, like, I'll never forget, I interviewed Jonathan Haight. And when I ask him, like, the hard questions, he literally, like, pulls up literature that God knows which interest group has, like, typed out and said to him, and he, like, reads verbata from these paragraphs. Because I don't even think that, like, some of these people who have been propelled to the front of this discourse and are given these massive pedestals, I don't even think that they are as littered on the issues as the queer teenagers who will be affected.

Jonathan Haidt, I would be surprised if that man could turn his own computer on because he does not understand the internet. This is a man who has fallen for multiple fake TikTok trends, okay? He is a boomer who did not grow up on the web, has no understanding and is frankly deeply misogynistic and is one of these people that, you know, essentially he promoted the theory that like the trans contagion theory, that basically like Instagram is turning your kid trans, you know, and that's why we need to ban it. Which is exactly what Marsha Blackburn said.

They are like, they are saying the exact same things. They are on the exact same side. They're reading the exact same talking points. And then you have all these leftists that are pushing this reactionary rhetoric that is just Jonathan Haidt talking points that's like get your kid off light, you know, disconnect your child from the world, disengage your child from the world, keep them ignorant. Don't allow them to, for instance, join a discord and discover other queer teens like keep them isolated and miserable. But as long as they don't have a cell phone, that's good.

And it's just, it's so short-sighted. It's so short-sighted. And it's like these queer teens, it is a lifeline for them. The internet and these discord communities and these forums where they're able to talk to other like young trans people. It blows my mind to see LGBT people join like the pro censorship brigade because I'm like, do you not remember what it was like to be like an LGBTQ teen? You cannot talk to your family or community about who you really are if you grow up in an environment that is like homophobic or transphobic. The internet is your reason to keep living. And when I would speak to kids about this, they would literally be like, yeah, my mental health

was so bad that I don't know if I would still be here if it weren't for my online communities and lifelines. And so many young women as well. Like, I mean, the world hates women. And like you said, there are just these like amazing communities online where you could. and like it's harder now, but like learn about like feminist thought. And like, I mean, that's the first time I heard about like body positivity and just like all of these sort of progressive ideals. And just to get back to Lil Tay, obviously I want her to like find happiness and peace and stuff in the world.

But I think what's also interesting is that she didn't post nudes on her only fans. Like the men that bought her only fans thinking that they were going to get some sort of explicit content were disappointed because she just had sort of reposted. her sexually suggestive Instagram stuff, like basically public content and very safe for work content. And I guess one man posted that he had asked for like a private picture, which, you know, a lot of people that use only fans do. And she just sent a picture of a hello kitty. And so she sort of like fleeced these men for over a million dollars, potentially millions of dollars. And I think that like even that, you know what I mean? Like she did not even put her own nudes online yet. And she might. And she's that's her prerogative by the way she's an adult at this point but you're still seeing these calls to ban only fans because it's it's the the idea of this influencer making money off these men is so offensive to people yes and that really goes to show how much of it is truly a moral panic that is not even rooted in facts or reality and it's like this kind of reflects on what we've already talked about but i also think it's so telling that she's already been able to profit from posting this type of stuff on platforms like instagram

She's not profiting as much because the monetization setup is so different, but it's like this type of content is already plentiful on the exact same internet that will be bolstered and supported by things like age verification. Meta stands to benefit so much from age verification and that it's the exact same content. Well, it's exactly. It's just safe for work content. And it's just it's actually suggestive content in some instances for sure. But yeah, it's just that on Instagram the men get it for free. And I do think that a lot of these reactionaries don't even want women to be able to amass followings on Instagram because even that tips the balance of power in their favor.

Like even so, like the notion of a woman gaining online influence, like you see so much slut shaming online, right? Like she only has her followers because she's posting this or because she's hot or whatever. They just do not want women to have autonomy and power. And I think that this anti-porn stuff is really, really dangerous. It all comes back to garden variety. misogyny and the idea that there's nothing you can do as a woman to avoid this type of shaming. And like, you see it on Twitter as well. If a woman posts an outfit that's revealing,

there are AI models that will put more clothes on her. But if she puts on an outfit that's chast, there are AI models that will undress her. So it's like the ultimate goal here of this sort of moral panic is just to re-entrench and uphold the ability to control women and strip women's autonomy from them. And it's very, very obvious and transparent. And it's like the person who had that viral tweet of, we need to ban only fans, if you go and look at his other content, he is literally using these threads that are espousing red pill rhetoric about porn

and about the porn industry to profit from and to advertise these like anti-porn apps. In themselves, there's like a whole grift there. And it all feeds back into this banosphere ideology that ultimately revolves around like not giving women any power. Like the ultimate end goal of this Frederick is it's telling men that like when you support only fans, when you support women's right to be a sex worker, the problem is that they're taking your power back from you. And you need to do whatever it takes to like reconsolate your power and make sure that women are actually the ones being subjugated. It's very similar, ultimately, to what Andrew Tate says and does and the rhetoric that he espouses. It all comes back to this like red pill, extreme toxic misogyny. Yeah, and some of the most viral tweets that, again, people are engaging with across the political spectrum are from accounts like Rache for the Patriarchy, which is this woman Rachel Wilson, who identifies herself as a patriarchist.

She's quoting something about Lill Taitish says, this is the sort of behavior by young woman online that needs to be punish, shame. and ostracized. And then you see all these other people tweeting about it, like accounts like, defend the West, which is a white supremacist account, saying only fans needs to be seriously examined and banned, exploited through childhood for money now as an adult. And again, it's not about child exploitation, it's not about safety.

Like, if they cared about those things, we would have a lot of very different legal framework than we have right now. Just the way that these child influencer laws are not about child safety and they're not about protecting child influencers. They are about censorship and control. censorship and control. 100%.

And I also think that with these types of extreme, like, white supremacist accounts joining on these bandwagon, it's like, of course they have ulterior motives. Of course, the women who they care about protecting the most are the white women who they want to be at home raising their children. Like, there are so many extremely bigoted ideologies that are the very clear undercurrent of this stuff. But then you have people on the left who don't recognize that and join in. Kat, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Tell people where they can continue to follow your work.

You can follow my work at my newsletter, Spitfire News. It's Spitfireniews.com, and I will be reporting on this and other topics there. All right, that's it for this week's Free Speech Friday. Don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, Usermag.com. That's usermag.com, where I write about all of this stuff and more. You can watch full episodes of Free Speech Friday on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. If you're listening on a podcast platform, please give a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. Thanks so much and we'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday.