Good morning. Ready to surf the net like it’s 2004? Community-focused social message board Digg is relaunching under the leadership of founder Kevin Rose and Reddit founder and investor Alexis Ohanian. They’re tagging in some AI tech to bring back the curated news, message boards, and diggs (like Reddit’s upvotes) that became a pillar of early 2000s internet in a bid to introduce some competition to Reddit’s market domination.

— Hannah Doyle 

Creator Platform Passes Sued for Underage Exploitation

Passes, the creator monetization platform founded by tech entrepreneur Lucy Guo, was accused of distributing child pornography in a class action lawsuit filed late last week.

Context: Passes launched in 2022 as a safe-for-work OnlyFans competitor, where creators could share content directly with fans who paid for subscriptions. It raised $40 million in venture funding last year, and the platform recently leaned into college NIL deals, signing partnerships with Livvy Dunne and the University of Michigan.

The accusations: Leading the class action suit, OnlyFans creator Alice Rosenblum claims that Passes—as well as Guo, investor Alec Celestin, and former Passes director of talent Lani Ginoza—allowed underage creators to join and encouraged the creation of explicit content that was then sold to subscribers on Passes’ internal messaging system.

Guo’s response: The allegations are false. “The lawsuit…is utterly meritless,” she wrote on X.

We spoke with creator attorney Tyler Chou to help read between the lines.

• “For there to be a lawsuit, it’s either one of two things. They were either blindsided or totally knew this was coming,” Chou told us. 

• Chou suggested Passes fell into the second category, given that the platform banned underage users last month.

Chou said none of her creator clients use Passes, but she suggests creators affiliated with the platform distance themselves. 

“Allowing underage users was a very thoughtful decision on their part. Child protection laws are so strong in the US, I’m sure they were advised on several levels [against it] and they chose to say actively ‘we’re not going to do that’...and that will come out in the deposition,” Chou said.

Going forward: Guo said on X, “We are confident the facts are on our side and look forward to presenting those facts in court.”

Female Creators Attacked on Streams

On Sunday night, Twitch streamers Valkyrae, Cinna, Emiru, and Amouranth were attacked in two separate incidents.

Valkyrae, Cinna, and Emiru were livestreaming their week-long Sis-A-Thon on the Santa Monica Pier in LA when a man started chasing and threatening to kill them. The attacker, who has not been apprehended, appeared to have been stalking the group. 

• Cinna and Valkyrae reported all three of them are safe. They decided to end the marathon stream early and shared more on Twitch about the troubling encounter. 

• “I think a lot of times the women in this industry can’t talk about the stalkers they have because it’ll only make them worse,” Cinna said. “Unfortunately this one was very public, and I feel like none of us can really move on.”

Amouranth shared on X that she was robbed by intruders in her Houston home. “I’m being robbed at gunpoint,” she wrote. “They wanted crypto is what they were yelling…they pulled me out of bed.”

• Amouranth later said she was safe and shared footage of the intruders fleeing.

• A police spokesperson told Decrypt that Amouranth’s husband fired shots in self-defense, injuring one of the intruders.

• In response to an X user suggesting she take a break from the internet, Amouranth said “Truth be told I don’t know if I’ll ever be back.”
  

Big picture: Creators like KallMeKris and Pokimane have spoken out about the expensive burden placed on female creators to keep themselves safe, with the latter revealing she spends over five figures a month on security. These stories have sparked conversation about what some call the “female creator safety tax.”

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Cooking Creator Launches 24/7 FAST Channel

Cooking creator Gemma Stafford is launching a 24/7 baking channel in partnership with connected TV company Future Today.

Stafford’s content will appear on connected TV platforms like Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Apple TV. 

The channel is an extension of Stafford’s Bigger Bolder Baking brand. Stafford and Future Today told Deadline that 97% of her audience has made at least one of her recipes and her content has been viewed for more than 15 million hours in aggregate.

🔥 Press Worthy

• YouTube is tightening its policies around online gambling content.

• Uppbeat is celebrating the launch of its new Motion Graphics library by giving away a DJI Osmo Pocket 3 and other creator prizes—learn more here.*

• Comedy creators Zach Piona and Wahlid Mohammad end their TMG Studios podcast.

• Ballerina Farm creator Hannah Neeleman publishes the first edition of her newsletter, The Goose Gazette.

• A hyper-realistic AI-generated Twitch streamer is going viral.

_{*This is sponsored advertising content.}