We already know that the United States Secret Service collaborates with other law enforcement agencies and monitors some social media platforms to detect potential threats to the people they protect. (You can even tweet tips to them if you hear anything.) While Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are probably good sites to monitor in case someone is stupid enough to discuss their violent plans publicly, other platforms don’t seem like obvious choices at first glance. Would you be surprised to learn that the Secret Service monitors sites including OnlyFans, Pinterest, and Twitch, sometimes on a regular basis? Recently revealed briefing sheets from the Service suggest that it’s apparently true. (Citizens for Ethics)
While it is well known that the Secret Service regularly monitors social media like Twitter and Facebook for threats, documents obtained by CREW show agents doing daily checks of accounts across the internet—including OnlyFans, Twitch and Pinterest.
In Secret Service briefing sheets from December 2020, agents were requested to conduct regular checks on several lists of Twitter, Instagram, OnlyFans, Twitch, Parler and Pinterest accounts. The majority of these accounts are shown to have been private or already inactive—one OnlyFans account was deactivated by the platform. The usernames are redacted.
While social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are known to cultivate toxic political environments often punctuated with violent rhetoric, OnlyFans and Pinterest are not known for threats against those protected by the Secret Service.
I’ll confess to not having an account on any of those three platforms, so I don’t know all that much about them. I found the inclusion of OnlyFans to be particularly surprising, though. I’ve seen OnlyFans mentioned in any number of headlines and articles, but it’s generally almost always about someone from the sports world or other avenues of entertainment going to OnlyFans to start making money by stripping or doing porn. (And some of them make a LOT of money, apparently.)
Depending on your preferences, you might find it rather enjoyable to be told to go monitor the site as part of your job. But would you be able to track down potential threats that way and are there even any people making threats from that platform? I decided to do some digging. The linked report points to a relatively brief list of OnlyFans accounts that the Secret Service needed to monitor at some point. But most of them are either deleted accounts or have been inactive for quite some time.
Looking further afield, I found people who perform on OnlyFans being arrested for threatening and assaulting someone in real life. But they didn’t do it on the channel. There have also been some sex trafficking stories involving the site. But most of the arrests that show up involve child pornography or exploitation of some sort.
When I tried narrowing the search parameters to find cases of threats against public officials, the only (mostly) valid hit I found was still a disappointment. It appears that Stormy Daniels has an OnlyFans account and she went on there to “threaten” to testify against Donald Trump. While that’s technically a match, I don’t think it’s the sort of thing that the Secret Service is sending out agents to investigate.
So perhaps that short list of accounts in the Secret Service briefing sheets were the only times that a threat to a protectee took place and they’ve all been dealt with. I suppose we could take some comfort in that because it’s one less thing to worry about. And there are still plenty of other whackos out there willing to threaten violence against high-ranking officials, former presidents, and all the rest. So the agents will have plenty to keep them busy going forward.
