Understanding the Complexities of Responsibly Sharing NSFW Content Online

Reddit is in the minority of mainstream social platforms that permit posting content that may be considered to be at the edge of what is permissible, including so-called Not Safe For Work (NSFW) content. However, NSFW is becoming more common on mainstream platforms, with X now allowing such material. We examine the top 15 NSFW-restricted subreddits by size to explore the complexities of responsibly sharing adult content, aiming to balance ethical and legal considerations with monetization opportunities. We find that users often use NSFW subreddits as a social springboard, redirecting readers to private or specialized adult social platforms such as Telegram, Kik or OnlyFans for further interactions. They also directly negotiate image "trades" through credit cards or payment platforms such as PayPal, Bitcoin or Venmo. Disturbingly, we also find linguistic cues linked to non-consensual content sharing. To help platforms moderate such behavior, we trained a RoBERTa-based classification model that outperforms GPT-4 and traditional classifiers, such as logistic regression and random forest, in identifying non-consensual content sharing, showing better performance in this specific task.