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British media watchdog Ofcom has dropped an investigation into whether the subscription streaming platform OnlyFans is allowing children to access adult content.
The UK regulator last year raised concerns that the site’s age verification process was failing to block children from accessing pornography after an age-checking error.
It also said that OnlyFans may have “failed to provide complete and accurate” information to the media regulator of its internal controls.
On Tuesday, Ofcom said it had closed the investigation into whether Fenix International — which owns OnlyFans — breached its duty to implement measures to protect under-18s from encountering restricted material such as pornography.
However, it will keep a separate part of its investigation open into whether OnlyFans failed to provide complete and accurate responses to statutory information requests.
It added: “Where appropriate, Ofcom’s supervision team will continue to engage with OnlyFans around the way it implements measures to protect children from restricted material.”
OnlyFans scans users’ faces with technology provided by a government-approved service, Yoti, which estimates age. It also requires credit card details.
The platform told Ofcom that the threshold for accessing content was set at 23 years old — a buffer of five years above the 18-year-old threshold in case users appeared older. In reality, however, the threshold had actually been set at 20.
Ofcom was investigating whether 20 was a sufficiently robust threshold to prevent under-18s from signing up.
London-based OnlyFans said at the time that it had “proactively” reported the problem to Ofcom after discovery of an error that was blamed on a “coding configuration issue”.
But Ofcom said that it had grounds to suspect that OnlyFans — which is used by sex workers to reach their paying customers — “did not implement its age-verification measures in such a way as to sufficiently protect under-18s from pornographic material”.
OnlyFans said on Tuesday that the age had now been set at 21. It added: “Since 2021, OnlyFans has used the government-approved age-assurance provider, Yoti, to check that UK fans are over the age of 18.
“At all times, OnlyFans’ age assurance was set to at least 20 years old. OnlyFans is, and has always been, confident that these measures are sufficient to meet our obligations to protect under 18s from accessing restricted material.”
Ofcom, which has been the regulator of UK video sharing platforms since November 2020, is cracking down on children’s safety online with new rules over social media sites using the Online Safety Act.
This legislation gives Ofcom greater powers to hold tech companies accountable for allowing under-18s to access adult content, with rules set to be imposed to make social media sites bring in strict age verification measures and tackle harmful content.
