On 26 March 2026, CNN published a months-long investigation documenting a global online ecosystem in which men share techniques for drugging their partners, record the assaults, and distribute the material to a mass audience.

The platform at the centre is Motherless.com. It recorded approximately 62 million visits in February 2026, which is equivalent traffic to Reuters. It hosts more than 20,000 videos of women filmed while unconscious during sexual assault, organised under searchable tags. Survivors identified in the investigation are resident in the United Kingdom and Western Europe.

The platform remains online.

Ofcom fined the platform's parent entity, Kick Online Entertainment S.A., in February 2026, but only for age-verification failures. The content itself has not been investigated.

The Online Safety Act 2023 gives Ofcom clear powers to investigate platforms hosting illegal content, including intimate image abuse and material facilitating serious sexual offences. Those powers have not yet been applied here.

This is not a free speech question. The First Amendment is an American constitutional principle; it does not apply in the United Kingdom. The relevant legal framework is the Online Safety Act 2023, which is precisely designed for this situation.

This is not a content moderation question. It is a human rights question. Non-consensual recording and distribution of sexual assault engages the right to dignity and privacy under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, CEDAW General Recommendation 35, and the Council of Europe Istanbul Convention.

We are calling on Ofcom to:

1) Open a formal content investigation into Motherless.com under the illegal-content provisions of the Online Safety Act 2023.

2) Assess whether Kick Online Entertainment S.A. has discharged its content-related duties under the Act, separately from the age-verification matter already concluded.

3) Provide a formal public statement on whether an investigation will be opened and, if not, on what grounds.

Governance analysis of the case, including the applicable regulatory instruments and the leverage available to UK regulators: https://open.substack.com/pub/anastarou/p/platform-complicity-as-a-stewardship

CNN investigation: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2026/03/world/expose-rape-assault-online-vis-intl/index.html