LONDON — U.K. communications regulator Ofcom has rejected a formal complaint from OnlyFans, which alleged unfair treatment during a 2022 BBC report about its moderation practices.
BBC had aired a segment called “OnlyFans Uncovered” — which they described as “an investigation” — on its Newsnight program and also online through its iPlayer service.
The BBC report reproduced statements by an anonymous source they only identified as “a senior U.S. investigator,” who claimed they had found images of minors on OnlyFans.
The BBC reported Monday that they had agreed “not to identify the investigator, who redacted account usernames to protect their investigation.”
According to OnlyFans’ complaint to Ofcom, the platform was treated unfairly because the BBC “had refused to provide it with detail about the images, such as account handles or URLs,” the BBC reported. “This information, it argued, would have enabled it to find out if the images had ever been posted on the platform, or if they had, how quickly they had been removed or reported. OnlyFans said that this had denied it a meaningful right of reply and left viewers with a misleading impression of its safety efforts.”
Ofcom rejected the complaint on Monday, claiming that “OnlyFans had been provided with sufficient information to understand the nature of the allegations and given an appropriate and timely opportunity to respond,” BBC reported.
Earlier this month, Ofcom opened a separate investigation into “whether adults-only website OnlyFans is doing enough to prevent children accessing pornography on its platform,” Reuters reported.
“Having reviewed submissions we received from OnlyFans in response to formal information requests, we have grounds to suspect the platform did not implement its age-verification measures in such a way as to sufficiently protect under-18s from pornographic material,” an Ofcom rep told Reuters.
Allegations broadcast on programs such as “OnlyFans Uncovered” are routinely used by U.K. politicians to justify government regulation of free speech online. The BBC has also a history of broadcasting sensationalist “porn panic” stories, routinely quoting anti-porn activists without questioning any of their claims.
As XBIZ reported, in 2021 BBC News’ Education Editor published a tendentious report advocating government censorship of adult material by cherrypicking a variety of questionable sources, including a a man only identified as a concerned parent who turned out to be a clergyman with an active campus ministry who made YouTube sermons about the evils of pornography.