Multiple accounts on the popular online adult service OnlyFans have been reported after it was discovered that many of them feature sexual content of teenage girls who are underage.
26 such accounts were reported by Matt W.J. Richardson, head of intelligence at The Canadian Open Source Intelligence Centre, on Dec. 16. He further noted that many of the accounts featured multiple girls, with more than one of the girls featured being underage, reported Reuters.
"What is alarming is the scope and scale of it," said Richardson.
He reported the accounts for containing suspected child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. They were removed from the platform within a day of him filing his report.
Richardson believes some of the accounts may be operated by the same individuals after noticing how they were linked to one another through promotional posts.
OnlyFans has stated that explicit images of minors below the age of 18 are not permitted on the platform, including images of adults pretending to be minors.
A spokesperson for the platform confirmed that OnlyFans practices "strict onboarding processes to ensure all creators are over the age of 18." She further stated that the platform adopted a "zero tolerance approach" to content of underaged individuals on the platform, and that the team behind the platform would cooperate with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in order to "thoroughly investigate any reports they receive from others about our platform."
In August, CEO Kelly Blair revealed that OnlyFans practices a vetting process that includes a "pre-check team" that enlists technology to detect and remove any content that is "extremely likely to be a child." She also revealed that all content is reviewed by human moderators at some stage in the vetting process, and that the company is focused "on keeping the community safe and keeping the community for adults only."
Over the course of 2023, the platform submitted 347 reports to NCMEC, "vastly fewer than the millions of instances that are reported by other social media platforms where users can remain anonymous and where content is unmoderated," an OnlyFans spokesperson pointed out.
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