IRS agents could soon have one of the strangest government assignments imaginable: watching OnlyFans content to decide whether creators qualify for a tax break on tips.
That’s the picture painted by Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks, and by Sharon Reed and Tehron Von Ghasri on Indisputable, as they walk through how Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” turned into an OnlyFans headache for the IRS.
How Trump’s “No Tax On Tips” Bumped Into OnlyFans
Ana Kasparian starts by explaining the core issue: Trump’s big tax package created a “no tax on tips” deduction for workers in jobs that customarily receive tips.
Digital content creators, entertainers, performers, and dancers were all listed as eligible categories.
On paper, that sounded like a win for a lot of online creators.
But Kasparian notes there was a carve-out buried in the fine print.
Tips earned for prostitution or “pornographic activity” are excluded from the deduction.
That’s where things get messy.
According to Kasparian, the IRS and Treasury now have to figure out who on platforms like OnlyFans is doing “pornographic activity” and who isn’t.
Because OnlyFans isn’t just explicit content.
Kasparian says she learned there are chefs, fitness trainers, musicians, and even comedians using the platform to sell their work.
So now you have a tax break that applies to tipped “digital entertainers,” but specifically not to those engaged in porn.
And the only way to tell the difference for many creators is to actually go look at their content.
Which is how you wind up with IRS agents literally reviewing OnlyFans pages as part of an audit.
What Even Counts As “Pornographic Activity”?
Kasparian points out that there’s no official data on how many OnlyFans creators produce explicit content versus non-sexual material.
But the bigger problem is definitional.
What is “pornographic activity” in tax terms?
She runs through the gray areas.
What about streamers who don’t get naked but wear very revealing outfits?
What about “provocative dancers” in various stages of undress?
What about creators who post nothing but feet photos because that’s what their subscribers want to see?
Kasparian notes that some people absolutely use content like that for sexual purposes.
But does that automatically make it pornography under the law?
To highlight the ambiguity, Kasparian references Justice Potter Stewart’s famous line from 1964 on obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”
She says that’s basically what IRS agents are now expected to do—look at a creator’s content and decide, by gut, whether it crosses the invisible line into porn.
From there, enforcement looks very personal and very subjective.
In practice, Kasparian explains, an IRS examiner would need to view a creator’s OnlyFans content, decide if it’s pornographic, and then deny the no-tax-on-tips deduction if they think it is.
The deduction is capped at $25,000 in tips, but that’s still real money for working creators.
And all of this rests on a government employee staring at your content and making a judgment call.
Indisputable: “You’ll Know It When You See It” – But That’s the Problem
On Indisputable, host Sharon Reed picks up the same thread.
She cites reporting described by Andrew Duehren at The New York Times, noting that the law bars tips from prostitution or pornographic activity from qualifying for the tax break.
But Reed points out that Congress didn’t actually define “pornographic activity” in a clear way.
The IRS hasn’t issued precise guidance either.
So once again, she says, we’re back in Potter Stewart territory: “I know it when I see it.”
And that’s apparently what the IRS expects its agents to do—know it when they see it, one audit at a time.
Reed stresses how big OnlyFans is.
She notes that there are millions of creator accounts, and not all of them are posting sexual content.
Fitness, food, niche hobbies, and more all live on the same platform as explicit material.
That means agents will be wading through everything from workout videos to foot-fetish content trying to determine what’s “titillating” versus what crosses into legally “pornographic.”
Tax preparer and educator Thomas Gorczynski is cited on Indisputable warning that this will all come down to individual judgment.
Sometimes something is obviously pornography.
But other times it’s completely subjective—one viewer might see it as artistic or silly, another might see it as erotic.
Tehron Von Ghasri then jumps in with the legal background.
He points to the Supreme Court’s Miller v. California decision and the “Miller test” for obscenity:
Does the content appeal to prurient interest?
Does it depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive way?
Does it lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value?
Von Ghasri explains that, in theory, those are the kinds of questions that judges and agents could use when deciding what counts as pornography for tax purposes.
But even that test is incredibly subjective in practice.
And now the IRS is being asked to apply that in the context of a brand-new tax break.
Cenk Uygur: Culture War Meets Tax Code
Cenk Uygur, co-host of The Young Turks, is less focused on the technical legal test and more on the politics behind the carve-out.
Uygur notes that most of Trump’s “big beautiful bill” was a massive giveaway to the wealthy.
He says the no-tax-on-tips part is one of the few broadly good ideas tucked into the package.
But then, he says, conservatives insisted on excluding porn and sex work from the benefit.
To him, that’s a sign the right is drifting back toward trying to punish or marginalize pornography outright.
Uygur also highlights what he sees as obvious hypocrisy.
He points out that Trump himself famously had an affair with a porn actress, and yet his administration signed off on a rule that singles out pornographic activity for worse tax treatment.
Then Uygur zooms out to the size of the OnlyFans ecosystem.
He cites numbers showing billions of dollars spent on the platform in a year, millions of creators, and hundreds of millions of fan accounts worldwide.
To him, that scale makes the carve-out feel both symbolic and unworkable.
You’re trying to micromanage a huge global online marketplace with vague language and a handful of auditors.
He jokes that now the IRS will “have to watch some porn” as part of their job, and no one’s exactly going to feel bad for them about that.
But beneath the humor, the point is serious: this is a culture-war rule turned into a bureaucratic problem.
When Your Job Is Watching OnlyFans for the Government
Reed and Von Ghasri on Indisputable lean into how bizarre this looks from the outside.
Reed notes that some IRS agents won’t have to worry about getting written up for watching explicit content at work – because now it might actually be part of their assigned duties.
Von Ghasri jokes about applying to become an auditor “for the good of the country,” but he also reminds viewers that this is how audits already work in other industries.
The IRS checks your books, your business practices, your receipts.
If your business is OnlyFans, that means checking your content.
The difference here is that now government employees are being asked not just to verify that you have a business, but to judge the sexual nature of what you post.
There’s also an equity question buried in all this.
Creators whose content lands just on the “clean” side of whatever line a bureaucrat draws will get a tax break.
Creators whose content is deemed pornographic will be denied that benefit—with no bright-line rule they can rely on ahead of time.
Reed worries that different IRS agents, different judges, and different regions could all interpret similar content in wildly different ways.
A foot-fetish page in one jurisdiction might be deemed “just weird,” while another might call it pornographic because of how it’s framed or marketed.
That kind of inconsistency isn’t great for taxpayers or for trust in the system.
A Tax Fight That Could Land at the Supreme Court
Von Ghasri, thinking like a lawyer, suggests this kind of dispute is exactly the sort of messy borderline question that could eventually land at the Supreme Court.
He compares it to the old tariff debate over whether tomatoes are legally treated as fruits or vegetables.
Science says tomato is a fruit, but the law decided to treat it as a vegetable for tariff purposes.
The classification, he notes, ended up being about taxation, not biology.
The same thing might happen here.
At some point, courts may have to decide whether certain kinds of online content—maybe even something as apparently mundane as feet photos – are legally pornographic for tax purposes, even if they don’t look like traditional porn.
Reed jokes about how certain justices might suddenly become extremely engaged if a case like this reaches the high court.
But under the humor is a real concern: do we really want our definition of “pornographic activity” being hammered out through individual audits and scattered court fights?
From a policy standpoint, it’s an odd place to plant a flag.
If lawmakers wanted to deny tip deductions to sex workers, they could have been honest and explicit about that broader goal.
Instead, they used a carve-out that pushes the hardest decisions onto IRS agents and tax judges.
A Culture War Hidden in the Fine Print
Stepping back, both The Young Turks and Indisputable are really talking about the same bigger issue: how culture-war politics slipped into the tax code and created a practical nightmare.
Kasparian doesn’t think this is necessarily a coordinated plan to crush sex work, but she does see it as an effort to make sure the “wrong” people don’t get the benefit of a tax break.
Uygur sees it as yet another example of conservatives trying to punish sexual expression they disapprove of while still benefiting from the rest of the bill’s giveaways.
Reed and Von Ghasri focus on how vague laws and moral panic combine to create strange, intrusive enforcement.
In the end, the story isn’t really about IRS agents watching porn for fun.
It’s about lawmakers writing culture-war language into serious economic policy and leaving regular workers – and the bureaucrats who audit them – to sort out the mess.
And the people most likely to get squeezed are the ones who already live on the edge of social and legal acceptance: online sex workers and small creators who can’t afford a tax lawyer, but now have to worry that a stranger at the IRS will “know it when they see it” in all the wrong ways.
Raised in a small Arizona town, Kevin grew up surrounded by rugged desert landscapes and a family of hunters. His background in competitive shooting and firearms training has made him an authority on self-defense and gun safety. A certified firearms instructor, Kevin teaches others how to properly handle and maintain their weapons, whether for hunting, home defense, or survival situations. His writing focuses on responsible gun ownership, marksmanship, and the role of firearms in personal preparedness.
