When Gwen, a 25-year-old sex worker from Toronto, noticed a TikTok trend where people were personifying popular restaurant chains, she immediately spotted an opportunity. “It was perfect to be made into a porn video,” she recalls. “A lot of other creators had done Goth IHOP or Femboy Hooters content – but I wanted to take on milf Denny’s.”

In her TikTok-inspired video, Gwen plays a waitress who works at Denny’s, and seduces a customer into impregnating her in the break room. The video, a trailer for which was uploaded to Pornhub, was one of Gwen’s best-sellers in 2020. “The response was amazing,” she says.

The success of the video speaks to a wider phenomenon – the profound influence TikTok is having on the sex industry beyond the app itself. Pornhub, for example, is filled with videos mimicking one of the app’s popular trends or challenges, or sexualised compilations of clips downloaded from TikTok – often without the creator's consent or knowledge, and, troublingly, sometimes featuring people who appear to be under the age of 18.

This phenomenon is partly down to TikTok’s ‘For You’ page – a mixture of trending clips and recommendations which makes it more likely for a video to go viral and to be posted elsewhere. “TikTok has allowed me to connect with a whole new, diverse group of followers that I wouldn’t be able to reach through Twitter or Instagram,” says Gwen, who has accumulated 125,600 followers on TikTok since joining last September. “It’s been an integral part of my business growth in the past half a year.”

TikTok has also allowed Gwen to show her fans a different side to her personality. She’s made use of the platform’s popular ‘Silhouette’ and ‘Buss It’ challenges, and used TikTok Live to talk directly with followers.

Sam*, a 28-year-old sex worker from San Francisco, also uses the app’s editing features, such as to make her videos. “It’s kind of like being at a strip club, when the performer does something exciting,” she says. Transition edits – which allow users to suddenly change outfits, or go from fully clothed to nude – are made easy on TikTok, and have emerged as a particularly popular feature among sex workers using the app.

While nudity and sexual activity goes against TikTok’s community guidelines, a number of these types of videos slip past the algorithm – and besides, videos don’t need to contain explicit content to help performers drive traffic to other platforms.

The demand for ‘TikTok-style’ porn videos, and the app’s superior editing tools, is fuelling the rate at which NSFW TikTok videos are crossposted to other platforms, such as Pornhub and OnlyFans. Gwen says that in the past she has created a video on TikTok, screen recorded it and uploaded it straight to OnlyFans – without ever posting to TikTok.

This use of unpaid social media as a marketing tool for paid work elsewhere is nothing new. However, since the introduction of FOSTA-SESTA, a US law intended to curb sex trafficking, it has been more difficult for sex workers to advertise their services online. The bill, which was introduced in 2018, was an attempt to shut down the websites that facilitate trafficking, but a number barred posts from sex workers entirely to avoid any potential legal issues, often forcing them into more dangerous situations.

Instagram and Tumblr, for example, were extremely popular platforms among sex workers, before they started clamping down on them in the wake of FOSTA-SESTA. More recently, Instagram was denounced by sex workers after it introduced new updates penalising users who ‘implicitly or indirectly’ offer or ask for sexual solicitation, at a time when the community has been made particularly vulnerable by Covid-19.

Compounding this is the fact that platforms such as OnlyFans have ballooned in popularity during the pandemic. This is where TikTok-style videos – posted on the app or across other platforms – provide a new way to cut through the noise.

It should come as little surprise, then, that subreddits dedicated to posting NSFW TikToks are growing in size. After r/TikTok and r/TikTokCringe, the next most popular TikTok subs are r/TikThots, r/TikTokThots and r/TikTokHot. One of the largest, r/TikTokXXX, has more than 61,000 members, and has gained over 20,000 new subscribers in 2021 alone. Although, according to one of the sub’s moderators, only “30 to 40 per cent” of the videos on the sub have actually come from TikTok: most, he says, are using the sub and the TikTok aesthetic to get traffic and to tap into the app’s 18+ Gen Z audience.

Gen Z and young millennials are, after all, more willing to pay for adult content compared to previous generations – particularly if the star of the video is also the creator. This reflects a broader shift in tastes favouring ‘homemade’ porn videos, with ‘amateur porn’ being the most popular category in the US and third most popular worldwide, and an increase in searches for ‘natural’ bodies and authentic situations.

“TikTok has added to this [demand for ‘homemade’ porn], but I wouldn’t give TikTok all the credit for it,” says Katrin Tiidenberg, professor of participatory culture at Tallinn University and co-author of Sex and Social Media. “We had a decade of Tumblr, which taught whole generations about the mixture of body positivity, social justice and sex positivity.” That said, TikTok has hardly had a history of promoting body positivity, with leaked documents from 2019 revealing the suppression of disabled, queer and fat creators.

Still, according to one of the mods of r/TikTokXXX, videos that tend to perform highly on the subreddit are ones that appear DIY and authentically ‘TikTok’. The mods claim to ‘upvote’ content which is “fun, ‘on-brand’ and follows a challenge,” and ones that include the TikTok watermark, which is applied to all videos posted to the TikTok app (although users can download unpublished videos without the watermark).

Even when videos aren’t made using the TikTok app, many still adopt the memetic formats, challenges, and distinct visual language popularised by TikTok. “This is done in order to lend popularity or relevance,” and “borrow the fresh feel of TikTok aesthetics”, says Tiidenberg.

“Porn has always been a ‘remake’ genre," she adds. "There’s a porn version of everything popular, right after it becomes popular.” Tiidenberg points to porn websites, and even news sites, which have remade themselves to look more like TikTok in order to capitalise off the site’s huge popularity.

There is also a darker side to “borrowing aesthetics made by children” especially on platforms like r/TikTokXXX, where the implication might be that the creator is underage. This points to the issues of consent and legality which arise from the sharing of TikTok videos across other platforms. These videos might not contain anything explicit, but, if shared without a creator’s permission and out of context, they could, as Tiidenberg puts it, “pornify things that weren’t supposed to be porn”.

One of r/TikTokXXX’s mods says that the content on the subreddit is meant to be shared with the consent of the original creator, and that videos will be removed if this is not the case. Pornhub ran into similar controversy last year when it was reported that a compilation video of a TikTok trend popular among minors had been uploaded to the adult website. Of course, this isn’t the first time Pornhub has been denounced for hosting nonconsensual content: last year the site was forced to delete the majority of its videos when it was revealed that the site was hosting content featuring children, teenagers and victims of sex-trafficking. In January, TikTok changed its settings so that videos created by users under the age of 16 are now set to private by default.

With the growing censorship sex workers find themselves subject to on TikTok – often without ever posting anything explicit – crossposting is becoming a necessary option for those looking to advertise their services. TikTok’s community guidelines state that accounts that attempt to redirect traffic to sexual content can face permanent bans, which has led some sex workers to believe that their accounts were removed for including either a direct link to OnlyFans, or to a Linktree (a third-party app where creators can list all of their social media accounts in their bios). Last November, swathes of accounts belonging to sex workers were deleted in what the community called the ‘TikTok purge’. A TikTok spokesperson says the safety of its community is a “top priority”.

For many sex workers, the need to remain across as many platforms as possible outweighs other concerns. “The TikTok community is so engaged and creative, I would make accounts 100 times over to stay there,“ says Gwen. “Every other site is going to censor me too, so I might as well be putting my effort into the most active one – TikTok.”

And besides, as Sam puts it, there are ways around TikTok’s policies. “You can still play by TikTok’s rules and generate a substantial income. It just takes some dedication.” As conditions grow more hostile for sex workers on the app, this dedication will likely involve finding life for their TikTok videos beyond TikTok.