Ofcom Summary of Adjudication

 

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic,

CBBC/Sky Kids, November 2024

 

This is a summary of findings by Ofcom, the communications regulator, regarding the American animated series "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic", broadcasted on Freeview by CBBC, and on paid television by Sky Kids.

 

In November 2024, Ofcom received 1.5 million complaints, 900,000 of them from CBBC viewers and 600,000 from Sky Kids viewers, mainly about content that is unsafe for children, including depictions of suicide, alcoholism, slavery, attempted murder, among others.

 

Ofcom has concluded that both Sky and the BBC were misled, and thus unable to appropriately handle the content they were transmitting on their children's television channels. This has resulted in breaches of the Ofcom Broadcasting Code, which is designed to ensure that when broadcasters show potentially unsafe material, they do so in a way which offers adequate protection to the viewers, including children.

 

Ofcom has found that both CBBC and Sky Kids breached the code on 12 and 14 separate occasions, respectively. Their decisions to broadcast episodes such as "Hearts and Hooves Day", "Inspiration Manifestation", and "The Cutie Map", all uninterrupted and unedited, resulted in major breaches for failing to protect children.

 

There were also serious failures in Sky and the BBC's compliance processes, who were unaware of inappropriate content in the series, and these failures were further compounded by erroneous age ratings in other countries, such as Brazil and the United States, which were likely used by Sky and the BBC to determine whether the series were appropriate or not. This compounded their failure to ensure compliance with the Code.

 

These are significant failings. Ofcom has therefore imposed a formal sanction on the BBC and Sky, directing them to broadcast this statement on all their channels, including CBBC and Sky Kids, respectively. This ensures the largest number of viewers will be made fully aware of the seriousness of their failure to comply, despite it being accidental. Furthermore, the rightholders of the series, Warner Brothers Discovery EMEA and Hasbro Entertainment, have been fined £2,000,000 for misleading the British Broadcasting Corporation and Sky Group Limited into broadcasting potentially unsuitable content on their children's television channels.

 

While Ofcom accepts that neither the BBC nor Sky intended to show inappropriate content to young viewers, as likely did the series' rightholders, Ofcom took the view that this systematic and international failure constituted a substantial breakdown in the fundamental trust between creators, broadcasters, and their viewers, and has further recommended that the BBFC take measures to provide age classification to television and streaming content.

 

For the full adjudication, please visit http://www.ofcom.org.uk, or scan the QR code on screen.