• The attention economy has no morality clause 

There are few things the Sri Lankan internet enjoys more than collective outrage, and over the past month, one surprisingly persistent online discourse revolved around a topic many did not expect would dominate timelines for quite this long: the arrival of a foreign adult content creator in Sri Lanka and the local influencers who chose to collaborate with her.

The creator in question, an Indo-Fijian adult actress and OnlyFans model, visited Sri Lanka as part of what has now become an increasingly common online strategy amongst adult content creators. 

While many creators in the adult industry maintain explicit content behind paywalls such as OnlyFans, they also often cultivate ‘platform-friendly’ public personas on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook in order to build mainstream audiences and market themselves more broadly.

This strategy often involves travel collaborations, where creators visit different countries, collaborate with local influencers, appear on podcasts, create lifestyle vlogs, and engage with local culture, all while subtly growing their audience and visibility.

Therefore, as is now fairly common globally, the actress publicly asked whether any Sri Lankan content creators would like to collaborate during her visit. Several local creators responded.

One creator, who recently rose to fame online relatively quickly, created a series of videos that remained mostly brand-friendly and platform-safe, though heavily laced with innuendo and suggestive humour. 

More notably, the actress also collaborated with a controversial Sri Lankan creator known for hosting podcast-style conversations with personalities who have gone viral or become culturally significant online. During her stay, the pair produced vlogs and social media content exploring Sri Lankan culture, local cuisine, and tourism experiences.

An uncomfortable divide

Almost immediately, social media erupted into arguments about morality, culture, ethics, influence, pornography, and responsibility. 

Some accused the creators of ‘selling out’ for views. Others claimed they were promoting pornography and sexually promiscuous behaviour to local audiences. Many argued that what the actress did professionally did not align with Sri Lankan culture and therefore local influencers were acting irresponsibly by giving her a platform.

But others questioned whether the outrage itself revealed deeper discomforts about sex, morality, and women’s bodies online. Because notably, the local creators themselves did not create explicit content with the actress. They adapted her into their existing formats – comedy, podcasts, travel-style content, and social media collaborations. Yet much of the discourse treated her very presence as inherently immoral.

The reaction revealed an uncomfortable divide in how Sri Lankans understand adult content creators, sex work, online culture, and morality itself.

Attention as currency 

For Nilakshi Ranasinghe, who strongly disagrees with the collaborations, the issue is less about censorship and more about social responsibility. 

“I genuinely think influencers underestimate how much they normalise behaviour,” she said. “You can say ‘people have freedom’ all you want, but if someone has a large audience, especially younger audiences, then what they promote matters.”

Nilakshi said her discomfort came not necessarily from the woman existing as an adult content creator, but from the way such collaborations became glamorised online. “It becomes less about freedom and more about marketing a lifestyle that many people still feel is exploitative and unhealthy,” she explained, adding: “I think local creators absolutely know sensational content like this brings views.”

That last point is difficult to deny. Online attention economies reward controversy. Algorithms reward engagement. And in the influencer world, outrage is often just another form of marketing.

In many ways, collaborations like these are strategically brilliant because they guarantee discussion. Some people will support it, some will hate it, but almost everyone will talk about it. And in digital culture, attention itself has become currency.

Cultural context 

For Ranaka Welisara, another critic of the collaborations, the issue lies in cultural context. “There is a difference between saying adults should have freedom and saying we should normalise everything publicly,” he said. “Sri Lanka still has cultural values, whether people like hearing that or not.”

Ranaka opined that many local influencers increasingly prioritised virality over responsibility. “Sometimes it feels like creators are willing to push any boundary if it gets them more followers,” he said. “Once you build your audience through trust, you also have some responsibility towards them.”

The phrase ‘our culture’ appeared constantly throughout the online debate. But what exactly Sri Lankan culture means in the internet age remains deeply contested.

After all, Sri Lankan audiences already consume enormous amounts of global online content daily, from Western reality television and hypersexualised music videos to OnlyFans-adjacent influencer culture on TikTok and Instagram. The internet itself has fundamentally blurred cultural boundaries.

And this is where the counter-argument emerges, because for many people, collaborating with an adult content creator does not automatically equal promoting pornography itself.

Dananjaya Mahen believes much of the outrage was performative moral panic. “The internet acts shocked about things people are already consuming privately. People are pretending this woman’s existence has suddenly corrupted society,” he noted. 

Dananjaya argued that the local creators largely kept their content platform-safe and adapted the collaborations to fit their own audiences. “They didn’t shoot explicit content,” he said. “They made vlogs, podcasts, jokes, travel content. The outrage made it sound like they were filming adult movies in public.”

He also believes audiences themselves need to exercise more discernment online. “At some point, adults must take responsibility for what they choose to watch,” he said. “And children should already be using social media under parental guidance anyway.”

Moral judgement vs. legal analysis

This argument of audience responsibility versus influencer responsibility sits at the centre of most online discussions. Do influencers have heightened ethical obligations because they possess influence? Or are audiences ultimately responsible for filtering what they consume? The answer becomes even more complicated once law enters the conversation.

One major issue throughout the discourse was the widespread confusion between pornography, adult content creation, and sex work. Many people used the terms interchangeably despite them being legally and socially distinct.

In Sri Lanka, sex work itself is not explicitly illegal. However, various related activities, including solicitation and brothel keeping are criminalised under the Penal Code. Meanwhile, the creation and dissemination of pornographic material remains illegal under Sri Lankan law.

This distinction matters because much of the outrage online framed the actress simultaneously as a pornographic content creator, a sex worker, and a morally corrupt individual, often collapsing multiple conversations into one emotionally charged debate.

And that collapse revealed something else: the fact that many people still fundamentally struggle to separate moral judgement from legal analysis.

Harin Wijesekara believes this confusion contributed heavily to the hysteria surrounding the collaborations. “People started using words interchangeably without understanding what they actually meant legally,” he said. “The discussion became emotional very quickly.”

Harin said people also tended to reduce adult content creators into one-dimensional caricatures rather than seeing them as full individuals. “Whether you personally agree with her work or not, she is still a human being. And collaborating with someone does not automatically mean endorsing every aspect of their life.”

That point became especially relevant because much of the criticism online focused less on the collaborations themselves and more on the actress’s perceived morality as a person, and notably, the outrage was often gendered.

Female sexuality online continues to provoke uniquely intense reactions compared to male-driven sexual content industries. Female adult creators are often framed not just as controversial, but as morally dangerous or socially contaminating.

The language used during the discourse frequently reflected this. Critics often described the actress not simply as someone creating explicit content, but as a “corrupting influence” whose mere presence threatened local audiences and values.

A broader cultural shift 

At the same time, however, concerns around influence are not entirely unreasonable either. Influencer culture today operates in an environment where parasocial relationships are extremely powerful. Followers often feel personally connected to creators. Younger audiences especially can be impressionable. And controversial collaborations inevitably attract attention precisely because controversy drives engagement.

The question becomes whether creators should self-regulate based on potential social impact or whether internet culture itself has simply moved beyond those kinds of gatekeeping expectations.

This debate is also happening during a broader cultural shift globally. The boundaries between mainstream celebrity culture, influencer culture, adult content creation, and online entrepreneurship are increasingly collapsing into each other. OnlyFans creators now appear on podcasts, reality shows, YouTube channels, and mainstream interviews regularly. Many adult creators strategically cultivate softer, more marketable online identities precisely to cross over into mainstream digital culture, and audiences themselves are increasingly desensitised to these overlaps. 

Which is perhaps why the Sri Lankan backlash felt both predictable and strangely outdated simultaneously. Predictable because Sri Lanka remains deeply conservative in many ways, particularly around sexuality and women’s bodies. Outdated because the internet itself no longer functions within clean moral or cultural boundaries.

The truth is that Sri Lankan audiences are already deeply embedded within global internet culture whether they acknowledge it or not. And perhaps what this discourse really exposed is not simply disagreement about pornography or influencer collaborations, but anxiety about how impossible it has become to control cultural exposure in the digital age.

Because ultimately, this was never just about one adult content creator visiting Sri Lanka. It was about attention economies. About morality. About sex. About shame. About influence. About audiences trying to decide where they personally draw ethical lines in an internet culture where almost everything is now content, and like most online moral debates, the answer depends entirely on who you ask.

Some believe influencers have a duty to avoid platforming industries they view as exploitative or harmful. Others believe adults have the right to consume and create whatever legal content they choose. Some see collaborations like these as cultural decline. Others see them as ordinary internet behaviour inflated into scandal by collective outrage.

What is undeniable, however, is that internet culture has fundamentally changed the relationship between morality, celebrity, and public visibility, and increasingly, the people who generate the most discourse online are not necessarily the people breaking rules. They are simply the people exposing how differently everyone defines them.