The Advertising Standards Authority has banned an advert from the ecommerce platform Alibaba, showing a naked infant doll with realistic-looking female genitalia, for over-sexualising children.
The image showed the infant doll with “spread legs and an open mouth”, which the ASA ruled was “socially irresponsible, and likely to cause serious and widespread offence”.
The image, spotted as a paid-for ad on the Daily Mail website earlier this year, appeared alongside two others that depicted a memory stick with a gun-shaped holder and a lacy thong.
The initial complainant argued that the advert portrayed an infant in a sexualised way, and was “harmful, offensive and irresponsible”.
In response, Alibaba stated that the doll was a nursing mannequin that was sold on other ecommerce platforms, not just its own.
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The Singaporean company questioned whether the ad had potentially been placed through third-party ad network that used an algorithm to generate and display ads on its website for Alibaba.
Alibaba – which has a policy that product listings should not feature images of genitalia – explained that the product had been listed by a third-party seller, and they were not involved in the sale or manufacture of the product.
The Daily Mail, the advert’s publishers, stated that the ad served on their website programmatically.
Ruling that in the context of a news site, consumers would not expect medical training devices or ‘nursing mannequins’ that depicted infant genitalia, the ASA concluded the advert would be perceived as a child ‘sex doll’.
“We considered that there was a high risk of consumers receiving the impression that the advertised product was a sex doll in the form of an infant,” the advertising watchdog said.
“We further considered that impression was likely to be reinforced by the image’s juxtaposition with images of other products that had connotations of sex and violence.”
It ordered the platform to take the advert down and ensure future adverts did not portray or represent anyone under 18 years of age in a sexual manner.
