Ofcom has today fined Tapnet Ltd – which provides the video-sharing platform RevealMe – £2,000 after the company did not respond to a statutory request for information.
Under legislation passed by Parliament, Ofcom’s job is to make sure that UK-based video-sharing platforms (VSPs) have appropriate measures in place to protect users from certain types of harmful material in videos. Last year, we issued a number of information requests to VSPs to help us understand and monitor the safety measures they have in place and to inform the VSP report we published in October.
VSPs are required by law to comply with a statutory demand for information from Ofcom. Information gathered during this process is fundamental in enabling us to carry out our job as a regulator. It is therefore crucial that VSPs provide accurate and complete information in a timely fashion.
Tapnet did not provide the required information by the deadline, and following a formal investigation, we have confirmed that this failure breached our rules.
In deciding the level of financial penalty, we took into account, among other things, the size of the company and that the information was ultimately provided to Ofcom swiftly after the opening of our investigation.
We will publish a non-confidential version of our full decision in the next few weeks.