Media Regulation (ASA)

The media industry has a wide variety of content, with that there is a regulation of new media technologies is to ensure the cultural diversity in media content, and provide a free space of public access and various opinions and ideas without censorship.

In the UK there a few different committees that regulate different types of media:

Radio - IPSO

Television - OFCOM

Adverts - ASA

Movies - BBFC

In the UK, actions such as providing a Watershed, which is a time period where anything shown on TV should be family friendly spanning from 5.30 am to 9.00 pm. The committee that regulates adverts or ASA censors and bans adverts to protect viewers, they do this by taking in complaints from viewers, which is then reviewed. 

Statistically, a large majority of adverts in the UK are reviewed for misleading information and false advertisement, and other adverts are reviewed for vulgarity, nudity, and more.

An example of this is the case of an Adidas poster for a sports bra advert that was banned for nudity in February, 2022.

The poster contained the bare breasts of 20 women of various skin colours, shapes and sizes. The pictures were identically cropped to show only the torso from below the shoulders. This caused an issue as they were advertising a sports bra product. Nudity can only be malicious if it was identified as sexual or objectifying, Adidas published this advert thinking that this poster was not intended to objectify nor sexualize women. But at the end of the day ASA concluded that the way the women were portrayed were in fact sexually explicit or objectified them, and considered that the depiction of naked breasts was likely to be seen as explicit nudity. ASA also concluded that the advert was inappropriately targeted because children or underage people were able to consume the advert.