how to cite pictures

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Locating and Using Images for Presentations and Coursework

• Free & Open Source Images
• How to Cite Images
• Alt Text Image Descriptions

Copyright Resources

• Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States from Cornell University Library
• Copyright Overview from Purdue University
• U.S. Copyright Office
• Fair Use Evaluator
• Visual Resources Association's Statement of Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study
• Creative Commons Licenses

Attribution

Again, the majority of images you find are under copyright and cannot be used without permission from the creator. There are exceptions with Fair Use, but this Libguide is intended to help you locate images you can use with attribution (and in some case, the images are free to use without attribution when stated, such as with stock images from pixabay). ***Please read about public domain . These images aren't under copyright, but it's still good practice to include attribution if the information is available. Attribution : the act of attributing something, especially the ascribing of a work (as of literature or art) to a particular author or artist. When you have given proper attribution, it means you have given the information necessary for people to know who the creator of the work is.

Citation General Guidelines

Include as much of the information below when citing images in a paper and formal presentations. Apply the appropriate citation style (see below for APA, MLA examples).

• Image creator's name (artist, photographer, etc.)
• Title of the image
• Date the image (or work represented by the image) was created
• Date the image was posted online
• Date of access (the date you accessed the online image)
• Institution (gallery, museum) where the image is located/owned (if applicable)
• Website and/or Database name

Citing Images in MLA, APA, Chicago, and IEEE

• Directions for citing in MLA, APA, and Chicago MLA: Citing images in-text, incorporating images into the text of your paper, works cited APA 6th ed.: Citing images in-text and reference list Chicago 17th ed.: Citing images footnotes and endnotes and bibliography from Simon Fraser University
• How to Cite Images Using IEEE from the SAIT Reg Erhardt Library
• Image, Photograph, or Related Artwork (IEEE) from the Rochester Institute of Technology Library

Citing Images in Your PPT

Currently, citing images in PPT is a bit of the Wild West. If details aren't provided by an instructor, there are a number of ways to cite. What's most important is that if the image is not a free stock image, you give credit to the author for the work. Here are some options:

1. Some sites, such as Creative Commons and Wikimedia, include the citation information with the image. Use that citation when available. Copy the citation and add under the image. For example, an image of a lake from Creative Commons has this citation next to it:  "lake"  by  barnyz  is licensed under  CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

2. Include a marker, such as Image 1. or Figure 1., and in the reference section, include full citation information with the corresponding number

3. Include a complete citation (whatever the required format, such as APA) below the image

4. Below the image, include the link to the online image location

5. Hyperlink the title of the image with the online image location

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• Last Edited: Jun 8, 2023 3:28 PM
• URL: https://guides.lib.purdue.edu/images

APA Citation Style, 7th edition: Figures/Images

• General Style Guidelines
• One Author or Editor
• Two Authors or Editors
• Three to Five Authors or Editors
• Article or Chapter in an Edited Book
• Article in a Reference Book
• Edition other than the First
• Translation
• Government Publication
• Journal Article with 1 Author
• Journal Article with 2 Authors
• Journal Article with 3–20 Authors
• Journal Article 21 or more Authors
• Magazine Article
• Newspaper Article
• Basic Web Page
• Web page from a University site
• Web Page with No Author
• Entry in a Reference Work
• Government Document
• Film and Television
• Youtube Video
• Audio Podcast
• Electronic Image
• Twitter/Instagram
• Lecture/PPT
• Conferences
• Secondary Sources
• Citation Support
• Avoiding Plagiarism
• Formatting Your Paper

Helpful Tip!

If you are unable to find the author/artist then use the title in your signal phrase or the first word or two of the title in the parentheses.

If there is no date available then use the abbreviation "n.d." (for "no date").

When possible, include the year, month, and date in references. If the month and date are not available, you may use the year of publication.

Situations this Section Covers

There are are many different types of figures, however, APA uses certain basic principles for all figure types.

Types of figures:

• photographs/images

This section will cover the following examples:

• Image from an Electronic Source

For more examples and information, consult the following publications:

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association  (7th ed.)

Call Number:  BF76.7 .P83 2020

Locations:  Main Reference Collection 1st Floor (1 copy); Book Stacks (5 copies)

About Citing Works of Art

Online Map: Title of work [Map]. (Date or date of latest update {Year, Month Day }). Site name (if needed). URL

Online Image/Web site; Artist's last name, artist’s initials. (Year). Title of work [Online image]. Site name (if needed). URL

For each type of source in this guide, both the general form and an example   will be provided.

The following format will be used:

In-Text Citation (Paraphrase) - entry that appears in the body of your paper when you express the ideas of a researcher or author using your own words.  For more tips on paraphrasing check out The OWL at Purdue .

In-Text Citation (Quotation) - entry that appears in the body of your paper after a direct quote.

References - entry that appears at the end of your paper.

Information on citing and several of the examples were drawn from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.).

Subject Guide

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• Next: Electronic Image >>

• Last Updated: Jun 25, 2024 9:21 AM
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How to Cite Images, Tables and Diagrams

The pages outlines examples of how to cite images, tables and diagrams using the Harvard Referencing method .

An image found online

In-text citations

Mention the image in the text and cite the author and date:

The cartoon by Frith (1968) describes ...

If the image has no named author, cite the full name and date of the image:

The map shows the Parish of Maroota during the 1840s (Map of the Parish of Maroota, County of Cumberland, District of Windsor 1840-1849)

List of References

Include information in the following order:

• author (if available)
• year produced (if available)
• title of image (or a description)
• Format and any details (if applicable)
• name and place of the sponsor of the source
• accessed day month year (the date you viewed/ downloaded the image)
• URL or Internet address (between pointed brackets).

Frith J 1968, From the rich man’s table, political cartoon by John Frith, Old Parliament House, Canberra, accessed 11 May 2007, <http: // www . oph.gov.au/frith/theherald-01.html>.

If there is no named author, put the image title first, followed by the date (if available):

Khafre pyramid from Khufu’s quarry 2007, digital photograph, Ancient Egypt Research Associates, accessed 2 August 2007, <http: // www . aeraweb.org/khufu_quarry.asp>.

Map of the Parish of Maroota, County of Cumberland, District of Windsor 1840-1849, digital image of cartographic material, National Library of Australia, accessed 13 April 2007, <http: // nla . gov.au/nla.map-f829>.  

Online images/diagrams used as figures

Figures include diagrams, graphs, sketches, photographs and maps. If you are writing a report or an assignment where you include a visual as a figure, unless you have created it yourself, you must include a reference to the original source.

Figures should be numbered and labelled with captions. Captions should be simple and descriptive and be followed by an in-text citation. Figure captions should be directly under the image.

Cite the author and year in the figure caption:

Figure 1: Bloom's Cognitive Domain (Benitez 2012)

If you refer to the Figure in the text, also include a citation:

As can be seen from Figure 1 (Benitez 2012)

Provide full citation information:

Benitez J 2012, Blooms Cognitve Domain, digital image, ALIEM, accessed 2 August 2015, <https: // www . aliem.com/blooms-digital-taxonomy/>.   

Online data in a table caption

In-text citation

If you reproduce or adapt table data found online you must include a citation. All tables should be numbered and table captions should be above the table.

  Table 2: Agricultural water use, by state 2004-05 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006)

If you refer to the table in text, include a citation:

As indicated in Table 2, a total of 11 146 502 ML was used (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006)

Include the name of the web page where the table data is found.

Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006, Water Use on Australian Farms , 2004-05, Cat. no. 4618.0, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, accessed 4 July 2007, <https: // www . abs.gov.au>.

FAQ and troubleshooting

Harvard referencing

• How to cite different sources
• How to cite references
• How to cite online/electronic sources
• Broadcast and other sources
• Citing images and tables
• FAQs and troubleshooting
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Finding + Using Images

• Image Support at Penn
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• Image Reuse + Publishing
• Fair Use + Permissions
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• Organize + Present Images

Image Captions and Citations

Citing images is just as important as citing sources for written works . In order to generate captions and citations, you'll need to gather information about the image you are using.

• Creator's name
• Title of the work
• Date of the work
• Date you accessed the image
• Institution where the image / work is located
• Name of website or database where you found the image
• Rights information

Citation Style Manuals

Manuals are continually updated so be sure to check the latest edition for guidance on citing images.

• Chicago Manual of Style Online Learn about illustrations in publishing in chapter 3 and about citing artworks in chapter 14. PennKey login.
• APA Style Guide to Electronic References You'll find image citation examples under Audiovisual Media. PennKey login.
• MLA Handbook Plus Use the latest online edition or MLA's citations by format guide . PennKey login.

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Image: freepik.com

When writing research articles and papers, the use of visual elements like images, diagrams, and tables can significantly enhance the presentation of data and arguments. However, you have to properly cite these elements to maintain academic integrity and respect copyright laws. This article guides you through the general rules and specific scenarios for citing images, with a focus on Harvard referencing, and explains how to list these references effectively.

Citing Images in Academic Works – General Rules

When you incorporate an image, table, or diagram into your academic work, it’s essential to provide a citation that includes the author, date, title, and source of the image. The purpose of citing images is to acknowledge the original creator and to allow your readers to trace the source material. This process typically involves two components: an in-text citation and a corresponding entry in the list of references.

For the list of references, the full citation of an image should include:

• the author’s name,
• the year of publication,
• the title of the image,
• and the internet address or publication where the image was found.

If the image is untitled, a brief description can be used in place of a title.

Citing and Referencing Specific Types of Images

Online/Digital Images . When citing an online image or diagram, the citation should include the author (if known), the date of creation (or the date it was accessed) for the in-text citation, and the title, and the internet address for full reference. The Harvard referencing system requires these details in both the in-text citation and the list of references.

In-Text Citation Example : “The cartoon by Frith (1968) humorously illustrates the political climate of the time, highlighting…” .

Reference Example: Frith J 1968, From the rich man’s table, political cartoon by John Frith, Old Parliament House, Canberra, accessed 11 May 2007, http://www.oph.gov.au/frith/theherald-01.html.

Online Images/Diagrams Used as Figures . Online images used as figures in your work should be properly numbered and include a figure caption. The figure caption typically consists of the figure number, a brief description, and an in-text citation.

For example: Figure 1: A diagram of the solar system (Smith, 2020).

Citing a Photograph or Image from a Museum or Institution (Viewed Online). In the case of citing photographs or images from museums or institutions viewed online, include the name of the artist, the year of creation, the title of the image, the name of the institution, and the internet address where the image was found. This type of citation recognizes both the creator of the work and the institution that houses it.

In-Text Citation Example: “The picture (Van Gogh) evokes a deep sens of..”

Example Reference: Van Gogh, Vincent. Starry Night. 1889. The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/works/79802.

Properly Citing a Photograph You Took. If you are citing a photograph that you took, the citation should include your name, the year the photo was taken, a title or descriptive caption, and a note indicating that it is your own work. For instance, in the Harvard referencing style, it would be: (Your Name, 2024, View of the Grand Canyon, author’s collection).

In-Text Citation Example: “The landscape’s stark beauty is captured in the photograph (Doe),” if the photograph was taken by a student named Jane Doe.”

Reference List Citation Example: Smith, Jade. Playing dogs. 21 Aug. 20010. Author’s personal collection.

The Differences of Citing Images in APA, MLA, and Chicago

Citing images in academic writing is an important practice for acknowledging sources and respecting copyright. The citation style varies depending on the format (APA, MLA, Chicago) and where the image was accessed (online, in-person). Here are general rules and unique examples for each style:

Online Images:

• General APA Format : Author Last Name, Initials. (Year). Image title [Format]. Site Name. URL
• Reference Entry Example: Johnson, K. (2022). Sunset Over the Mountains [Photograph]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/sunset-mountains
• In-Text Citation: (Johnson, 2022)

Images Viewed in Person:

• APA Format: Author Last Name, Initials. (Year). Image title [Format]. Institution Name, Location. URL (if applicable)
• APA Reference Entry Example: Monet, C. (1900). Water Lilies [Painting]. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States.
• APA In-Text Citation: (Monet, 1900)
• General MLA Format: Author Last Name, First Name. “Image Title.” Website Name, Day Month Year, URL.
• Works Cited Entry Example: Thompson, Alice. “Full Moon Reflection.” Pixabay, 5 Apr. 2022, https://pixabay.com/photos/full-moon-reflection-2022
• In-Text Citation: (Thompson)
• General MLA Format: Author Last Name, First Name. “Image Title.” Year, Institution Name, City.
• Works Cited Entry Example: Van Gogh, Vincent. “Starry Night.” 1889, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
• In-Text Citation: (Van Gogh)

Chicago Style

• Chicago Bibliography Entry Example: Smith, Robert. Morning Dew on Leaves . May 15, 2021. Photograph. Flickr. https://flic.kr/p/morning-dew-leaves
• Chicago Footnote: 1. Robert Smith, Morning Dew on Leaves , May 15, 2021, photograph, Flickr, https://flic.kr/p/morning-dew-leaves.
• Chicago Bibliography Entry Example: Degas, Edgar. The Star . 1878. Pastel on paper, 73 x 60 cm. The Louvre, Paris.
• Chicago Footnote: 1. Edgar Degas, The Star , 1878, pastel on paper, 73 x 60 cm, The Louvre, Paris.

When citing images via a free citation machine , it’s important to include all necessary details such as the creator’s name, the title of the image, the year it was created or published, the format (e.g., photograph, painting), and its location or source. If the image is included directly in the text as a figure, a copyright/permissions statement should also be provided. Following these guidelines allows proper attribution and enhances the credibility of your academic work.

Accurately citing images, whether sourced online, from a database or taken personally, is a critical aspect of academic writing.  Now, that you know how to cite an image, you can move on to bigger things and learn how to cite Youtube videos . It upholds academic integrity and shows respect for the original creators of these visual elements. By following these guidelines and using the Harvard referencing system, you can be sure that your use of images, tables, and diagrams adheres to the best practices of academic writing, making your work credible and ethically sound. Remember, a well-cited image not only adds value to your argument but also enhances the overall quality and reliability of your academic work.

Do I need to cite images in academic papers?

Yes, you need to cite images in academic papers. Citing images is crucial for several reasons: it acknowledges the original creator’s work, avoids plagiarism, and provides your readers with a source they can refer to for more information. Whether the image is a photograph, a painting, a diagram, or any other type, proper citation is essential in academic writing.

Is there a difference in citing images from websites and books?

Yes, there is a difference in citing images from websites and books. When citing an image from a website, you typically need to include the author’s name, the date the image was published or accessed, the title of the image, the format (e.g., photograph, digital image), the website name, and the URL. For images in books, the citation should include the author’s name, the date of publication, the title of the image, the format, the title of the book, the publisher, and the page number or location of the image in the book.

How do I cite an image with no author or date?

If an image does not have an author or a specific date, you can still cite it by providing as much information as possible. For an image without an author, start the citation with the title of the image. If the date is unavailable, use ‘n.d.’ (no date) to indicate this. For example, in APA style, it would look like this: Image Title [Format]. (n.d.). Website Name. URL.

Should I include URLs in image citations?

Yes, you should include URLs in image citations for images found online. URLs are important as they allow readers to directly access the source material. However, for images found in print sources or physical locations like museums, URLs are not necessary unless there is a specific webpage for the image.

How to format image citations?

The format of image citations depends on the citation style you are using (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.). Generally, the citation should include the author’s name, the year of creation or publication, the title of the image, the format, and where the image was found (website and URL, book title and page number, museum location, etc.). Follow the specific rules of the citation style required for your academic work, including how to format in-text citations and the reference list or bibliography entries.

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How to cite a photo in MLA

It is common practice to cite the work the photograph has been published in and provide the page number or chapter in the in-text citation. In case the photo has not been published in a journal article, book, or book chapter, but is rather on display in a museum or can be found online take a look at our MLA photo citation guides below.

MLA citation format for a photo

• Google Docs

To cite a photo in a reference entry in MLA style 8th edition include the following elements:

• Creator of the photo: Give the last name and name as presented in the source (e. g. Watson, John). For two authors, reverse only the first name, followed by ‘and’ and the second name in normal order (e. g. Watson, John, and John Watson). For three or more authors, list the first name followed by et al. (e. g. Watson, John, et al.)
• Title of the photo: Titles are italicized when independent. If part of a larger source add quotation marks and do not italize.
• Year of creation: Give the year of publication as presented in the source.
• Title of website: Give the official title of the website.
• URL: Copy URL in full from your browser, include http:// or https:// and do not list URLs created by shortening services.

Here is the basic format for a reference list entry of a photo in MLA style 8th edition:

Creator of the photo . Title of the photo . Year of creation . Title of website , URL .

• Creator of the photograph: Give the last name and name as presented in the source (e. g. Watson, John). For two authors, reverse only the first name, followed by ‘and’ and the second name in normal order (e. g. Watson, John, and John Watson). For three or more authors, list the first name followed by et al. (e. g. Watson, John, et al.)
• Title of the book:
• Edition: Include information about the edition if it is not the first.
• Publisher: If the name of an academic press contains the words University and Press, use UP e.g. Oxford UP instead of Oxford University Press. If the word "University" doesn't appear, spell out the Press e.g. MIT Press.
• Year of publication: Give the year of publication as presented in the source.
• Pages: Give the full page range preceded by pp. If only one page, precede with one p.

Creator of the photograph . Title of the photo . Year of creation . Title of the book , Edition ed., Publisher , Year of publication , Pages .

• Name of the museum: Provide the name of the museum, art gallery or exhibition site.

Creator of the photo . Title of the photo Year of creation , Name of the museum , Location .

Take a look at our works cited examples that demonstrate the MLA style guidelines in action:

Photo citation from a digital source

Karsh, Yousuf . Winston Churchill . 1941 . Karsh , karsh.org/photographs/winston-churchill/ .

Photo citation from a book

O’Keeffe, Georgia . Alligator Pears in a Basket . 1923 . Writing about Art by Henry M. Sayre , 6th ed., Pearson Prentice Hall , 2009 , p. 39 .

Photo citation from a museum

Webb, Todd . Stove in Paris Studio . 1951 , Museum of Modern Art , New York City .

How to do an in-text citation for a photo in MLA

When citing an image in-text using the MLA style, you'll use the surname of the photographer followed by the page number in parentheses.

In practice, you can expect your photo's in-text citation to be in this format (Creator of the photo, Page number) .

If you were to cite a photo from a book, the photo should be cited in-text using the creator's name, along with the corresponding page number.

Citation of a photo from a book on page 223

The painting is known to be the most parodied work of art in history (Da Vinci, 223) .

It's important to remember that you may not always be able to find all the information you need about the origin of the image. This is especially true if you are dealing with older, historical photographs.

If the creator of the photograph is not mentioned, you can place the image title or description instead.

Citation of a photo from a source where the creator of the photo is not mentioned on page 198

The painting was a story of the painter's own fear of the sea ("By the sea", 198) .

If the photo is found online, do not list a page number.

Citation of a photo found online

The photograph shows the flamboyant attire of the female dancers (Amero) .

This citation style guide is based on the MLA Handbook (9 th edition).

More useful guides

• Citing Images in MLA 8th Edition
• MLA Style Center Citing online images

More great BibGuru guides

• AMA: how to cite a book chapter
• MLA: how to cite a YouTube video
• Harvard: how to cite a UN report

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Images Research Guide: Citing Images

How to cite images.

There are many ways to cite images. Most important is to include all relevant information so others can locate, understand and evaluate any images you use.

Academic Styles of Citing Images:

APA Style (7th Edition)

MLA Style (9th Edition)

Non-Academic Style:

Image Credits

Reference List

General Format:

Creator, C. (Year of Production or publication). Title of work [Description, Medium, or other relevant information]. Source. Retrieval information or location of work.

Image Found on the Web Euloth, G. (2012). Sleepy Kitty, Purr, Purr, Purr [Photograph]. Flickr. https://flic.kr/p/bD838X

Image from a Database Sharkstar, A.J. (2014). Two Cats Bound Together By A Snake [Sticker]. A rtstor . https://library.artstor.org/public/SS7730635_7730635_12095826 

Image from a Book O’Keeffe, G. (1923). Alligator Pears in a Basket [Charcoal drawing]. In Sayre, H.M., Writing about art (6 th ed., pp. 39). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009.

Image from a Museum or Archive Website Lawrence, J. (1977). The Studio [Painting]. Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA, United States. https://art.seattleartmuseum.org/objects/10605/the-studio

Image in a Museum Mirra, H. (2016). Standard Incomparable [Textile]. Pasadena, CA: Armory Center for the Arts.

In-text Citations

(Creator Last Name, Year)

If there is no creator, use (Title, Year)

(Amero, 1951)

Figure Captions

Figure 1. Author, A. A. (Year). Title of material . [Description of material]. Retrieved from http://www.xxxx

Figure 1. Amero, E. (1951). Fiesta. [Print]. Retrieved from Artstor.

Image Credits (Non-Academic Style)

A credit statement can be an alternative to a full academic citation, and especially useful when writing for the Web. Provide a link to the image if you can.

Title by Creator, date (if available), via source (Creative Common License Type, if applicable).

Sleep Kitty, Purr, Purr, Purr by Glenn Euloth, 2012, via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Open Attribution Builder:

If you are using an openly licensed image, try generating an image credit with the Open Attribution Builder .

Why Cite Images?

There are many important reasons to cite images you use:

• Give credit to the creator of the image.
• Provide information so others can find and reuse the image
• Participate in ongoing scholarly conversations about images

MLA Style (Ninth Edition, 2021)

Works Cited List

Previously, researchers made citations by following the MLA’s instructions for the source’s publication format (book, DVD, Web page, etc.). Now, there is one standard, universal format that researchers can use to create their citations:

Author. Title of source. Title of container, Other contributors, Version, Number, Publisher, Publication date, Location.

Note: Containers are the elements that “hold” the source. For example, if a photo is posted on Flickr, Flickr is the container. Sometimes a source is nested inside of two separate containers, like an image found in a book read on an ebook platform like Ebook Library (EBL). Both the title of the source and its container (or multiple containers) are included in a citation.

Image Found on the Web Euloth, Glenn. Sleepy Kitty, Purr, Purr, Purr. 2012. Flickr , flic.kr/p/bD838X .

Image from a Database Amero, Emilio. Fiesta . 1951. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Artstor , https://library.artstor.org/#/asset/external/8D5Jcj0oMloyLyw%2Ffzx%2FRHsp

Image from a Book O’Keeffe, Georgia. Alligator Pears in a Basket . 1923. Writing about Art by Henry M. Sayre, 6 th ed., Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009, pp. 39.

Image from a Museum or Archive Website Lawrence, Jacob. The Studio . 1977. Seattle Art Museum, Seattle. Seattle Art Museum, www1.seattleartmuseum.org/eMuseum/code/emuseum.asp?style=browse&currentrecord=1&page=search&profile=objects&searchdesc=90.27&quicksearch=90.27&newvalues=1&newstyle=single&newcurrentrecord=1.

Image in a Museum Mirra, Helen. Standard Incomparable . 2016, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA.

In-text citations

(Creator Last Name, Page Number)

If there is no creator, use (“Title", Page Number)

For images found online, do not list a page number.

Fig 1. Ann Author, Title of Work , Museum and/or Publication information.

Fig 1. Emilio Amero, Fiesta , National Gallery of Art, 1951, Washington, D.C.

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Home / Guides / Citation Guides / How to Cite Sources / Citing Google Images in MLA

Citing Google Images in MLA

Citing an image.

To cite an image found through Google using the image-search function or through searching Google Images, identify the website where the image was originally posted. Cite the image as though you found it on the original website where it was posted. To find the publisher’s details, this means clicking through to the site with the image.

Do not list Google Images in the container slot since Google isn’t the original publisher of the image. If the image has no official title, create a short description of your own.

Image Citation Templates (MLA 9):

Image viewed online:.

Artist Last Name, First Name or Organization Name (if available). Image Title or Image description. Year Created. Website Title , URL.

Imaged viewed online in a publication:

Artist Last Name, First Name or Organization Name (if available). “Image Title” or Photograph of image description. “Webpage Title,” by Webpage Author Name, Day Month Year. Website Title , URL.

Illustration viewed online:

Artist Last Name, First Name or Organization Name (if available). “Illustration Title.” Website Title , Date, URL.

*Note: Make sure you use the name of the website where the image is posted, not just Google or Google Images.

Image Citation Examples (MLA 9):

Banksy. Show Me the Monet . 2005. Sotheby’s, https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2020/contemporary-art-evening-auction-2/banksy-show-me-the-monet?locale=en

Photograph of Swiss tourists getting a very close look at an elephant. “Swiss Couple on Safari Has Close Encounters of the Elephant Kind.” The London Telegraph, 13 May 2008, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/1952452/Swiss-couple-on-safari-has-close-encounters-of-the-elephant-kind.html

Reuter, Matt. Cartoon. The New Yorker , 8 July 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/friday-july-8th-rental-woes

Image In-text Citation Templates (MLA 9):

For in-text citations, use either the artist’s last name in parentheses or the image’s title or description. The title/description should be shortened to the first noun phrase in parenthetical citations. The parenthetical citation should always match the first item in the full reference on your Works Cited page.

(Artist Last Name)

(Shortened Image Title)

(Shortened Image Description)

Image In-text Citation Examples (MLA 9):

(Photograph)

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You will need the name of the image creator, the image title or an image description, the year of publication, the name of the publisher or website, and the URL (if it’s online). Here are two examples:

MLA : Johnson, Herbert. Critical Moments . 1921. Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/resource/acd.2a09222/.

APA : Johnson, H. (1921). Critical moments [Photograph]. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/acd.2a09222/

See this guide for more information on citing an image in APA .

Image with no author in APA style

To cite an image with no author in APA style, it is important that you know some basic information, such as the title of the image, publication date, publisher/museum/gallery name, physical location, and/or a URL.

Cite the source by its title. If the title is long, shorten it to a word or two for the in-text citation. Move the title of the work to the author position (followed by a period) before the publication date. If the title is italicized in the reference, also italicize the title in the in-text citation. If the title isn’t italicized in the reference, use double quotation marks around it. Capitalize the titles using title case, even when the reference entry uses sentence case.

Templates and examples for in-text citations and a reference list entry of an image without an author are below:

In-text citation template and examples:

Title of the Image (Publication Year) …

Royal Palace (1897) …

Parenthetical:

( Title of the Image , Publication Year).

( Royal Palace, Fontainebleau, France , 1897).

Reference list entry template and example:

In the reference list entry, set the title in italics and sentence case. Include the image’s medium inside square brackets after the date. Use “Image” unless you know a more specific medium, such as “Photograph” or “Clip art.” Do not use a period after the URL.

Viewed online:

Title of the image . (Publication Year). [Medium]. Publisher Name. URL

Royal palace, Fontainebleau, France. (1897). [Photograph]. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2019640696/

Viewed in person:

Title of the image . (Publication Year). [Medium]. Museum/Gallery Name, City, State Abbreviation, Country Name. URL

Royal palace, Fontainebleau, France. (1897). [Photograph]. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States. https://www.loc.gov/item/2019640696/

Image with no author in MLA style

To cite an image with no author in MLA style, it is important that you know some basic information, such as the title of the image, publication date, publisher/museum/gallery name, physical location, and/or a URL.

Cite the source by its title. If the title is long, shorten it to its most basic noun phrase. Move the title of the work to the author position (followed by a period) before the publication date. If the title is italicized in the reference, also italicize the title in the in-text citation. Capitalize the titles using title case.

Citation in prose:

Title of the Image …

… (Title of the Image ).

…. ( Mosaics ).

Works-cited-list entry template and example:

Title of the Image. Publication Date. Name of the Website . URL.

Mosaics from Ancient Times to the Modern World . 16 Dec. 2015. Decoded Past . www.decodedpast.com/art-in-history/.

Title of the Image. Publication Date. Museum/Gallery Name, City Name.

Mosaics from Ancient Times to the Modern World . 16 Dec. 2015. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

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A REUTERS SPECIAL REPORT

Onlyfans vows it's a safe space. predators are exploiting kids there..

OnlyFans says it vets every user and all content to keep children off its porn-driven platform. But a Reuters investigation of U.S. police and court files found complaints that hundreds of sexually explicit videos and images of minors – from toddlers to teens – appeared on the website. "Watch me get super wild," reads one post cited by authorities featuring a 16-year-old.

By LINDA SO , ANDREW R.C. MARSHALL and JASON SZEP

Filed July 2, 2024, 10 a.m. GMT

Editor’s note: Story contains accounts of child abuse

When a 16-year-old girl from Florida went missing in April 2023, her parents searched her phone, desperate for clues. What they found shocked them: For months, she’d sent nude photos and videos of herself to a man they now feared had abducted her.

“Some guy just flew in from New Jersey,” her bewildered father told a 911 dispatcher after reading her messages. “There’s some kind of sexual business and explicit photos… Something bad like that.”

The next day, sheriff’s deputies found the girl, partially naked, in a rented house with the man, according to police records. An investigation revealed he had posted dozens of sexual videos and images of the girl on OnlyFans, a booming online marketplace for homemade porn. One video, advertised for $20, showed the girl penetrating herself.

“Watch me get super wild,” read the caption. The man, Ethan Diaz, 22, was later charged with human trafficking and other offenses. He has pleaded not guilty.

OnlyFans makes reassuring promises to the public: It’s strictly adults-only, with sophisticated measures to monitor every user, vet all content and swiftly remove and report any child sexual abuse material. “We know the age and identity of everyone on our platform,” said CEO Keily Blair in a speech last year. “No children allowed, nobody under 18 on the platform.”

The Florida girl’s case, detailed in police records, court documents and interviews with law enforcement, undercuts OnlyFans’ claims. And it’s not an isolated example.

Reuters documented 30 complaints in U.S. police and court records that child sexual abuse material appeared on the site between December 2019 and June 2024. The case files examined by the news organization cited more than 200 explicit videos and images of kids, including some adults having oral sex with toddlers. In one case, multiple videos of a minor remained on OnlyFans for more than a year, according to a child exploitation investigator who found them while assisting Reuters in its reporting and alerted authorities in June.

The impact on some victims was devastating. “After I found out about the video, I couldn’t go outside without being scared somebody saw my face,” a young man told a Massachusetts court after a film of his sexual encounter at age 15 with a volunteer football coach ended up for sale on OnlyFans.

Parents expressed disbelief and outrage. “There has to be accountability for these platforms,” the father of a 16-year-old boy from Kansas told Reuters. The family’s ordeal, he said, is “a wound that will never heal.”

Of the 30 cases reviewed by Reuters, more than half resulted in an arrest and at least three in criminal convictions. Most – including that of the missing Florida girl – involved adults accused of preying on minors to create explicit content and sell it on the site. In other cases, minors got past OnlyFans vetting to purvey their own sexually explicit material, police records show. In the case involving toddlers, a man used the site to send another man more than 100 files featuring the abuse of children of all ages.

The 30 cases almost certainly understate the presence of child sexual abuse material on OnlyFans. Reuters used public records laws to obtain documents mentioning OnlyFans from more than 250 of the largest U.S. law enforcement agencies. While nearly half the agencies provided records, many heavily redacted them or declined to disclose any cases involving children, citing state laws to protect minors’ identities.

In response to detailed questions from Reuters, a company spokesperson said: “OnlyFans is proud of the work we do to aggressively target, report, and support the investigations and prosecutions of anyone who seeks to abuse our platform in this way.”

The spokesperson said OnlyFans had “rigorous safety controls” and voluntarily reports all suspected cases of child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC, a U.S. nonprofit designated by Congress to collect and disseminate tips to law enforcement. OnlyFans also works closely with law enforcement, charities, governments and other groups to “ensure we remain an industry leader in this field,” the spokesperson said.

OnlyFans didn’t respond to most of Reuters’ questions about the cases in this story, including how child abuse material was able to evade its monitoring and whether it has kept its revenue from accounts involving minors. None of the cases involved criminal charges against the website or its parent company, Fenix International. Reuters found no evidence that OnlyFans has been sued or held criminally liable for child sexual abuse content, according to a search of U.S. and international legal databases.

Federal free-speech protections have largely immunized social media platforms from liability for abusive content posted by their users. But as concerns mount about online harms – particularly involving children – Congress is seeking to toughen federal laws to hold the platforms accountable.

At a U.S. Senate hearing in January on the effects of social media, lawmakers lambasted Meta and four other major platforms for allegedly failing to sufficiently protect children. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged at the hearing to do better.

OnlyFans, which wasn’t summoned to the Senate hearing, has been praised by sex workers for making porn safer and more profitable. Celebrities and social media influencers, teachers and mothers boast that the platform has made them rich. Its 3.2 million content creators typically sell explicit images and videos for a monthly subscription fee, plus one-off payments, keeping 80% of the sales. OnlyFans takes the rest – a cut that yielded almost $1.1 billion in revenue in 2022, its latest financial disclosures show.

Those subscriptions – effectively, a paywall around nearly every OnlyFans creator – make the site difficult to scrutinize. Most content is inaccessible to non-subscribers and therefore harder to find and monitor compared to platforms such as Facebook or X.

This can impede investigations of alleged child abuse on OnlyFans, said Matt W.J. Richardson, a child exploitation investigator with the Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative, a U.S. nonprofit whose work includes identifying illegal content online. “It’s really hard to know specifically or exactly how much is on there,” he said.

Visitors to OnlyFans.com can only search for creators by their account names; they cannot search by interest category. This makes creators heavily dependent on popular social media sites to drive traffic to their OnlyFans accounts.

Some predators also use these mainstream sites to find minors to exploit on OnlyFans, police records show.

That’s how Diaz, the New Jersey man, allegedly ensnared the Florida girl. Reuters retraced her journey to OnlyFans from interviews with detectives, court records, police reports and bodycam footage. It began on Snapchat, a popular online hangout for teens, where she caught Diaz’s eye.

‘Romeo pimps’

Ethan Diaz, 22

CHARGE: Human trafficking, promoting a sexual performance by a child, other crimes

He opened with a deception.

The girl had been posting naked photos of herself on Snapchat. Diaz messaged her in February 2023, posing as a woman who – with a boyfriend’s help – had made lots of money selling such photos. Did the girl want to meet him?

Diaz then introduced himself as the boyfriend, messaging her under his own name. He gained her trust. He bought her a cell phone and told her she was beautiful, said St. Johns County Sheriff’s Detective Edward Scoggins, who investigated the case. Before long, the detective recalled, Diaz said he loved her and wanted to be with her forever.

Such tactics are often used by “Romeo pimps” who use “love bombing” and gifts to “manipulate somebody into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise do,” said Scoggins.

Diaz enticed the girl into making hardcore videos featuring masturbation and sex toys and then sold them on an OnlyFans account he controlled, police say. The girl also posted sexual content of herself to the account, allegedly under Diaz’s direction.

Then, on April 30 last year, Diaz flew in from New Jersey to film himself having sex with her. Porn with two people was “more desirable” on OnlyFans than videos of her solo, he told the girl. He picked her up in a white Tesla and drove her to an Airbnb 15 minutes from her home. He took her shopping and bought her lingerie, jewelry and shoes, according to Scoggins and police photos of the items and receipts.

When sheriff’s deputies discovered them at the Airbnb, Diaz had already filmed six sex videos with the girl, prosecutors said. He was arrested before he could post them on OnlyFans.

Still, over about three months in 2023, Diaz was able to post as many as 100 images and videos of the girl on the site, Scoggins said.

Diaz evaded controls meant to hold account holders responsible for their own content, according to Scoggins and a review of OnlyFans policies. Under OnlyFans current rules, would-be creators must provide at least nine pieces of personally identifying information and documents, including bank details, a selfie while holding a government photo ID, and – in the United States – a social security number. All this is verified by human judgment and age-estimation technology that analyzes the selfie, says the company.

But Diaz set up an account and had another woman verify it as hers, Scoggins said. That woman, whom police didn’t identify, later quit OnlyFans. But her account remained live and accessible to Diaz. He filled it with videos of the girl and promoted the content on Snapchat and Discord, a messaging service popular with gamers, to draw customers to her OnlyFans page. He made about $10,000 from all three platforms, Scoggins said, and paid the girl $1,500.

A Snapchat spokesperson said the platform’s “robust measures” make it “difficult for teens to be discovered and contacted by strangers.” A Discord spokesperson said “child-harm content” had no place on the platform. Neither commented specifically on the case.

Diaz is awaiting trial in state court, charged with human trafficking, multiple counts of promoting a sexual performance by a child and other crimes. In a statement, James Hill, his Florida lawyer, noted that Diaz was “only 21” when arrested. “From the date of his arrest, he has been aggressively fighting these charges against him,” Hill added. “He is, by law, presumed innocent.”

If found guilty of the charges, Diaz faces a mandatory life sentence.

Meanwhile, the girl has been left scarred, the family told the state attorney’s office. “No physical injuries,” a family member said in a written statement, “but emotional trauma.”

‘We see everything’

OnlyFans has made online safety central to its image.

“We moderate all of the content on our platform. Every text, every message, every audio clip, every livestream, everything gets moderated. We see everything,” CEO Blair said at a TEDx talk in 2023. “We’re doing it to keep our community safe.”

The company spokesperson said “the lack of anonymity and absence of end-to-end encryption on OnlyFans” allow law enforcement to investigate reports of illegal content on the site. End-to-end encryption keeps data entirely private between sender and recipient.

Some child-protection groups have praised OnlyFans. NCMEC, the U.S.-based clearinghouse, said the company participates in voluntary initiatives to detect and remove abusive content and has safety measures, such as age and identity checks, that some other sites don’t. NCMEC, which is heavily funded by the U.S. Justice Department, said it receives no financial support from OnlyFans.

The Internet Watch Foundation, a British nonprofit focused on eradicating online child sexual abuse, calls OnlyFans “an industry leader in online safety.” The foundation said OnlyFans pays 90,000 pounds ($114,000) a year for its services designed to detect images of child abuse.

A Reuters investigation published in March, however, found flaws in the website’s moderation process for adult content. In more than 120 cases in the United States and 18 in Britain, adults complained that sexually explicit material had been posted without their consent, in violation of OnlyFans rules and, in some cases, criminal statutes. An OnlyFans spokesperson said misuse of its platform is rare.

Underage users can also slip past OnlyFans’ monitoring and post their own explicit material for sale, police records and interviews show. A 19-year-old Maryland woman, Monie Graham, told Reuters she set up two accounts as a minor, both times evading the company’s age verification system.

After excelling in high school and graduating a year early in June 2022, Graham rebelled, she and her mother, Krystal McKeever, said. Graham was coming home late at night, getting into fights and refusing to get a job. McKeever kicked her out.

By that September, Graham said she turned to OnlyFans out of desperation. “I felt scared, I didn’t know what to do. I just needed a way to make money. So that’s when I was just like, okay, let me start an OnlyFans.”

Using the driver’s license of an adult acquaintance, she said, she set up an OnlyFans account and began selling sexually explicit material of herself. Soon, she was making money.

McKeever said she discovered the account in December 2022, tipped off by friends. They sent her a flurry of alarming texts with screenshots and recordings they had discovered on Graham’s OnlyFans account showing the girl having sex with “grown men,” according to a police report the mother filed.

The words “HORNY HOURS” were emblazoned on the girl’s OnlyFans profile page at that time, according to a screenshot viewed by Reuters. She used Twitter – now called X – and Instagram to promote the page, McKeever told police. “I have a sale going on,” the girl posted on Instagram. “Next 5 subscribers are only $5.”

Instagram parent company Meta didn’t comment on the case but said it doesn’t allow the sharing or solicitation of child sexual exploitation content. X declined to comment.

McKeever reported the underage sex videos to OnlyFans and offered to provide the child’s birth certificate, she said. She received a message from OnlyFans saying it would investigate and get back to her, she said. The girl’s OnlyFans account remained live on the site for weeks.

“I kept checking it every day and it was still up there,” McKeever said. “They never reached back out to me.”

McKeever wanted to press charges against OnlyFans for facilitating illegal content that exploited her child, she said. But when she contacted police in Baltimore County, Maryland, in December 2022, the officer said she couldn’t, “because he wouldn’t even know who to write the charge up against,” McKeever recalled.

A spokesperson for the Baltimore County Police Department declined to comment on McKeever’s statement. Reuters couldn’t reach the officer, who the spokesperson said no longer works at the department.

Frustrated, McKeever said she called the Federal Bureau of Investigation and pleaded for help in getting the videos removed. Ultimately, a county police detective got them taken down, according to the police spokesperson. Within a few weeks, the teen’s entire account was closed, McKeever said.

But Graham found another way onto OnlyFans. She asked her Instagram followers if anyone had an OnlyFans account they weren’t using, and a woman “just gave it to me,” she told Reuters. While still underage, Graham said, she started posting content on the new account.

“I wouldn’t want an underage kid doing what I did,” she said. “But at the same time, I had to do what I had to do.”

Reuters was assisted by Richardson, the child exploitation investigator, in tracing Graham’s activity on OnlyFans. He confirmed finding several sexually explicit videos of Graham that had been posted on the newer account on Jan. 4, 2023, months before Graham’s 18th birthday.

The videos were watermarked with the name of Graham’s closed OnlyFans account and had simply been reposted to the newer one. They had been sitting in that account, seemingly undetected by OnlyFans, for 16 months. Richardson reported the videos in June to NCMEC, and the account was shut down within days.

NCMEC declined to comment on the case but said all CyberTipline reports are shared with law enforcement for possible investigation.

OnlyFans declined to explain how the videos evaded its detection for so long.

Dangers and dollar signs

For some children, bypassing age controls is a gateway to an alluring world.

OnlyFans “presents itself as a platform that provides unrivaled access to influencers, celebrities and models,” said Elly Hanson, a clinical psychologist and researcher who focuses on preventing sexual abuse and reducing its impact. “This is an attractive mix to many teens, who are pulled into its world of commodified sex, unprepared for what this entails.”

In addition to the 30 police complaints of child sexual content on OnlyFans, Reuters found another 17 cases in which minors allegedly had OnlyFans accounts but showed no indication they had posted sexual content of themselves. In some of those cases, the police files made it clear that no sexual content of a child was posted; in others, it was impossible to establish due to redactions and limited information.

Even so, for a child to possess an account violates OnlyFans’ bedrock adults-only policy.

In one case in Riverview, Florida, police learned of a 15-year-old girl’s OnlyFans account in March 2023 after her classmates reported to school authorities that she was promoting it in group chats with other students.

The girl’s father told police she admitted to creating the account to “exploit men” and make money by posting nude images of women taken from the internet, pretending they were hers, according to a report by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office.

The father told Reuters he doesn’t know how his daughter was able to create the OnlyFans account and said the company should keep children off the site.

“A kid may only see dollar signs,” he said. “But they’re not understanding the dangers.”

‘People love your video’

Some children sound their own alarm.

In April 2021, a 17-year-old boy walked into the Boston Police Department to report that a volunteer high-school football coach almost twice his age was selling a sexually explicit video of the teen on OnlyFans.

Details of the case come from previously unreported court filings, including screenshots of messages between the two, an interview with the lead prosecutor on the case and an emotional statement the victim read out in court last December.

The boy was 15, but listed his age as 18, when he met the coach, Kharee Louis-Jeune, on a dating app in 2019.

Kharee Louis-Jeune, 36

CONVICTION: Child rape, distribution of child sexual abuse material, possession of child pornography SENTENCE: Three to five years in prison; ordered not to use OnlyFans

Louis-Jeune, of Brockton, Massachusetts, convinced the teen to let him record the two having oral sex in a Boston parking lot, insisting he wouldn’t share the video with anyone. Soon after, the boy told Louis-Jeune his true age. But the sexual relationship continued, on and off, for at least another six months.

In late 2019, the boy discovered the video had been posted on OnlyFans. He cut and dyed his hair, petrified that someone would recognize him, but soon the video began circulating at his high school. A classmate asked “if I had been sucking any penises in cars,” he recalled in his court statement. “My heart dropped and he ended up showing me the video.”

In March 2021, the boy had a final meeting with Louis-Jeune and told him he didn’t want to be touched. He secretly took down the man’s license plate number in case he needed it for a police report.

Two weeks later, Louis-Jeune messaged the teen: “People love your video.” Louis-Jeune sent a link to the OnlyFans site, where he was selling the parking-lot video for $6.

Later that day, the boy reported him to Boston Police. Authorities used a search warrant to obtain the video from OnlyFans. Part of the caption on the 36-second footage read, “Jamaican boo loves older men.”

“After I found out about the video, I couldn’t go outside without being scared somebody saw my face.” Teenage victim

In June 2021, police arrested Louis-Jeune. He initially denied knowing the victim or having an OnlyFans account. But police found the video on his phone.

Louis-Jeune, 36, pleaded guilty in December in Suffolk County Superior Court to charges of child rape, distribution of child sexual abuse material, and possession of child pornography. He was sentenced to three to five years in prison and ordered not to use OnlyFans. His lawyer declined to comment.

His victim, now an adult, wants to move on. “I just want this to be over so I can pretend it never happened,” he told the court.

Without his “courage,” said Ashley Polin, chief of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Unit, “I don’t think this ever would’ve crossed my desk.”

A risky business

OnlyFans has been hit before by accusations that it doesn’t adequately protect children.

In 2021, the BBC detailed several cases of explicit videos on OnlyFans involving teenagers. In response, OnlyFans’ parent company, Fenix, said it closed accounts it found to have indecent images of children. That same year, 102 Republican and Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives called on the Justice Department to investigate child sexual abuse on OnlyFans. The Justice Department told the lawmakers three months later that it couldn’t confirm or deny it was investigating OnlyFans. Contacted recently, a department spokesperson declined to comment further.

More reports of child abuse could pose a risk to the website. Mastercard, Visa and Discover have shown they will take dramatic steps when faced with allegations that their cards are paying for child sexual abuse videos and images.

In 2020, the card companies cut ties with Pornhub, another big adults-only platform, after a public outcry over alleged child abuse material and other illegal content. It was a painful hit, stopping card payments for Pornhub’s paid content and forcing it to rely more on ads and sales of user data.

OnlyFans says it doesn’t sell user data or allow third-party ads. That leaves it starkly dependent upon Mastercard, Visa and Discover: The website only accepts transactions with cards issued by them.

The three card companies said they still don’t accept payments from Pornhub. They didn’t comment further.

Pornhub parent company Aylo said it has “far-reaching safeguards” to prevent abuses on its platform and that any ongoing payment restrictions it faces are based on inaccurate or outdated information.

OnlyFans’ fortunes also lean heavily on other social media sites. The platform’s search function doesn’t allow users to trawl for content; they need to already know the name of the creator they want to subscribe to. That’s why OnlyFans creators often advertise on mainstream sites, attracting subscribers using sexualized photos, video snippets, and – on X – hardcore porn.

Wyatt Maxwell, 25

CONVICTION: Attempted production of child pornography

Half of the 30 police complaints about child exploitation on OnlyFans said Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and other social media played a role in promoting the content.

X, then called Twitter, helped 25-year-old Wyatt Maxwell earn thousands of dollars on OnlyFans before federal investigators discovered he had been exploiting a boy.

Maxwell, a cabaret singer, repeatedly filmed himself and a 16-year-old Kansas boy having sex at Maxwell’s home and a local park in 2020 and 2021. He posted about 20 videos on OnlyFans and a smaller rival website, JustFor.Fans, charging subscribers $15 a month on both platforms.

To promote his content, Maxwell used his Twitter accounts – including one called @someones_son. It paid off: Maxwell told a federal investigator he hauled in between $3,000 and $10,000 a month from OnlyFans and JustFor.Fans.

Ultimately, prosecutors said, he earned more than $49,000 on OnlyFans alone. OnlyFans’ cut would have been about $10,000, based on the standard 20% share the site takes.

In April, Maxwell pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to produce child pornography. He faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years. Maxwell’s lawyer declined to comment.

A JustFor.Fans spokesperson said the website was informed about Maxwell’s account by the FBI in February 2021 and immediately shut it down. “We take any activities involving minors incredibly seriously,” he added.

The boy’s father said the sexual exploitation was damaging enough to his family. That companies profited from it, he said, was just as bad if not worse.

X declined to comment.

Snapchat told Reuters that using the platform to promote OnlyFans, or any pornographic content, violates its policies. Meta said Instagram doesn’t allow users to share links to porn sites but doesn’t consider OnlyFans to be solely a porn site.

‘A little disturbing’

Once creators have built an audience, they can promote and sell content through chats or direct messages with subscribers. Those messages, along with all other content, are moderated, CEO Blair said in her TEDx talk and other speeches last year.

In one case, however, the messaging function allowed one man to share with another 125 explicit videos and images featuring sex acts involving at least 13 children. The sharing of the files went undetected for at least seven months, along with the lurid messages the two men exchanged about them, before OnlyFans reported the case to NCMEC. The case is detailed in documents Reuters obtained from the Broward County State Attorney’s Office in Florida. The documents didn’t record the origin of the material the two men shared or the identities of the exploited children.

Christopher Varney, 60, of Florida and Abel Esquivel, 35, of San Francisco started direct messaging on OnlyFans in August 2019.

Esquivel paid $5 a month to subscribe to Varney’s account, FTLgloryHole, which featured footage of Varney performing oral sex on strangers at his Fort Lauderdale-area home. The affidavit didn’t specify whether any were minors.

Christopher Varney, 60

CONVICTION: Obscenity SENTENCE: 60 months’ probation; ordered to stay away from children

Esquivel “became interested in child pornography” during the pandemic, he told investigators. He said he used OnlyFans to talk to others with similar interests.

In September 2020, Varney began asking his subscriber, Esquivel, for content: “You have any vids of y0ung you can upload?” Varney used a zero instead of the letter O, possibly as code. The word “young” is sometimes flagged by porn sites as denoting possible child sexual abuse material.

Several days later, Esquivel sent Varney eight files containing videos of boys aged eight to 16 masturbating and engaged in anal penetration. He sent three more videos, including one that showed a man sexually assaulting a young boy grimacing in pain, the records said. In March 2021, Esquivel sent videos and images of adults engaging in oral sex with toddlers, including one who was 18 to 24 months old, according to the case file.

“That’s a little disturbing,” Varney wrote after viewing the material.

When Esquivel apologized, Varney responded, “lol it’s all good. The toddler stuff just kinda freaks me out and a couple of them seemed like they weren’t exactly willing.”

Esquivel continued sending child sexual abuse material to Varney, including content that showed boys in bondage, according to a report by the San Francisco Police Department, which also investigated the case.

OnlyFans ultimately reported the illegal material to NCMEC in May 2021, seven months after it was first shared, leading to Esquivel’s and Varney’s arrests. The OnlyFans spokesperson didn’t respond to a question about why the company failed to discover the material sooner.

Esquivel pleaded guilty to possession and was sentenced in June 2023 in San Francisco Superior Court to two years’ probation and 13 days in jail but was given credit for time served. Varney pleaded no contest to an obscenity count in Florida’s 17th Judicial Circuit Court. He was sentenced to 60 months’ probation in July 2023 and ordered to stay away from children. Possessing and sharing child sexual abuse material generally carry a lighter sentence than producing it.

In a memo explaining the charge, prosecutors said Varney justified his conduct by saying he “played along” with his subscriber to avoid getting “a reputation for being judgmental.”

‘I do realize it’s illegal’

Online child sexual abuse can be hard to investigate and prosecute. Nearly a third of the U.S. police cases Reuters examined were closed without an arrest. In some instances, investigators couldn’t identify children who appeared on OnlyFans. In others, they cited a lack of evidence, exhausted leads or uncooperative witnesses.

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One young woman in Lakeland, Florida, dropped a complaint because she said she partly blamed herself, not her adult partner, for a filmed encounter posted on OnlyFans when she was 17, records show. Police closed the case of another minor in Houston because they said she seemed to be, of her own accord, selling content on the site that showed her and her boyfriend engaged in sex acts.

Because of OnlyFans’ paywalls, investigators must rely heavily on witnesses who happen to spot child content on the site and report it to parents or police.

It was a witness who in December 2022 tipped off authorities that a 16-year-old New York girl was featured in an OnlyFans video. She had been missing for a week after running off with a man in his 30s whom she’d met in a grocery store.

Police quickly identified the man as Matthew Richardson (unrelated to the child exploitation investigator with a similar name). An officer found Richardson’s OnlyFans account – listed under the pseudonym Skylar Ravenwood – where an FBI agent located a video of him having sex with the girl.

Matthew Richardson, 36

CHARGE: Producing and distributing child pornography

The next day, on Dec. 9, 2022, a police officer in Ohio found the pair in a stolen car at a highway rest stop and arrested Richardson. When FBI agents asked Richardson if he was aware that having sex with a 16-year-old was against the law, he replied, “I do realize it’s illegal,” according to a federal affidavit.

Richardson, now 36, has pleaded not guilty in federal court to charges of producing and distributing child pornography. His lawyer declined to comment.

Local police and federal authorities also declined to comment on the case, including whether they had alerted OnlyFans to the arrest.

OnlyFans says it continuously scans its website and can deactivate accounts that violate its rules. As of mid-June, the video allegedly featuring the girl appeared to have been removed. But, for $20 a month, people could still subscribe to Richardson’s account.

When Reuters asked OnlyFans about the case, the account was shut down.

Millions of paywalls impede scrutiny of OnlyFans

It is difficult to measure the extent of child sexual abuse images and videos on the porn-driven website OnlyFans, investigators and experts say.

The only publicly available statistics are provided by OnlyFans itself. Under federal law, U.S.-based electronic service providers – including social media platforms and porn sites – must report any suspected child abuse to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), a nonprofit designated by Congress to serve as a clearinghouse for such reports. As a UK-based company, OnlyFans isn’t legally obligated to file reports to NCMEC but says it does so voluntarily.

OnlyFans says it immediately removes any suspected child sexual abuse material it detects and makes a report to NCMEC’s CyberTipline. In 2023, the company made 347 such CyberTipline reports “out of hundreds of millions of posts,” an OnlyFans spokesperson said. “This is testament to the rigorous safety controls OnlyFans has in place.”

Much of this suspect material “does not turn out to be CSAM” – child sexual abuse material – “and/or are duplicate images or videos,” OnlyFans says on its website.

But five specialists in online child sexual abuse told Reuters the actual amount of CSAM on OnlyFans is difficult to verify independently due to the existence of individual paywalls for many of its 3.2 million creators.

“It’s not just one paywall. It’s a paywall for each and every contributor,” said Trey Amick, director of forensic consultants at Magnet Forensics Inc, a Canada-based company that supplies law enforcement agencies with tools to search for child sexual abuse material.

The information police can typically get from an account, without paying for a subscription or enlisting OnlyFans’ help, is a website address, a non-explicit photo of the creator and some text describing the account.

“Beyond that, it’s extremely difficult to acquire content that’s hosted behind the paywalls of OnlyFans,” said Amick.

Once police seek OnlyFans’ help in a case, the company provides them all the information they need, including account details, content and direct messages, the OnlyFans spokesperson said. “Police investigators do not need to subscribe to content,” she said.

The spokesperson also noted that NCMEC has “full access” to the site behind its paywalls.

NCMEC said that access began in late 2023 and was “limited” to OnlyFans accounts reported to its CyberTipline or connected to a missing child case. Beyond that, it added, NCMEC “does not proactively monitor, moderate, or actively seek to review content at scale” behind OnlyFans’ paywalls, or on any other website.

In 2021, OnlyFans appointed an “independent third party” monitor, Michael Ward, “to provide even greater transparency into our industry-leading safety measures,” its website said.

Ward, a former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor who now works at the law firm Baker Botts, was tasked with analyzing and assessing OnlyFans’ safety controls, the website said. OnlyFans didn’t respond to questions about him.

Contacted by Reuters, Ward said he couldn’t comment or confirm that he performed the role OnlyFans said he did.

How Reuters investigated alleged child sexual abuse on OnlyFans

Reuters used public records laws to seek documents on cases opened since 2016 involving OnlyFans from more than 250 of the largest U.S. law enforcement agencies. More than half supplied records that, at a minimum, mentioned OnlyFans in connection with a criminal complaint or information provided to police. Drawing from police and court records, reporters identified 30 complaints of child sexual abuse material on OnlyFans. Most documents were redacted by authorities to protect the privacy of alleged victims and witnesses.

Some agencies withheld case files in their entirety, citing privacy exemptions. Others didn’t respond, said they had no relevant records or provided records that weren’t relevant to this story.

Reuters also reviewed OnlyFans profile pages, body camera footage and messages exchanged between creators and subscribers or alleged victims.

Reuters sought to trace cases from their inception through the legal process and independently corroborate allegations but didn’t have enough information to investigate or corroborate every allegation. Reuters determined the status of cases, such as arrests and convictions, from records and interviews in 2023 and early 2024. The analysis doesn’t reflect subsequent developments.

In assessing the case reports, Reuters set criteria for including examples in its tally. Reporters didn’t include cases of people who simply heard from friends or family of child sexual abuse material that had been seen on OnlyFans, unless the person provided police with supporting information, such as an OnlyFans account name or other specific details of the explicit content.

OnlyFans Exposed

By Linda So, Andrew R.C. Marshall and Jason Szep.

So reported from St. Augustine, Florida, and Washington; Szep from Washington; and Marshall from London.

Photo editing: Maye-E Wong

Art direction: Catherine Tai

Design: John Emerson

Edited by Julie Marquis

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Contraception Is Free by Law. So Why Are a Quarter of Women Still Paying for It?

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has called on a government watchdog to investigate. Here’s what you need to know.

By Alisha Haridasani Gupta

Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, chair of the Senate health committee, called on a government watchdog to investigate why insurance companies are still charging women for birth control — a move that thrust access to contraceptives back into the spotlight .

In a letter to the Government Accountability Office , the senator noted that insurance companies were charging Americans for contraceptives that, under federal law, should be free — and that they were also denying appeals from consumers who were seeking to have their contraceptives covered. Some experts estimate that those practices could affect access to birth control for millions of women .

Since 2012, the Affordable Care Act has mandated that private insurance plans cover the “full range” of contraceptives for women approved by the Food and Drug Administration , including female sterilizations, emergency contraceptives and any new products cleared by the F.D.A. The mandate also covers services associated with contraceptives, like counseling, insertions or removals and follow-up care.

That means that consumers shouldn’t have any associated co-payments with in-network providers, even if they haven’t met their deductibles. Some plans might cover only generic versions of certain contraceptives, but patients are still entitled to coverage of a specific product that their providers deem medically necessary. Medicaid plans have a similar provision; the only exception to the mandate are plans sponsored by employers or colleges that have religious or moral objections.

Yet many insurers are still charging for contraceptives — some in the form of co-payments, others by denying coverage altogether.

A Quarter of Women Are Paying Unnecessarily for Contraceptives

In his letter, Senator Sanders cited a recent survey by KFF , a nonprofit health policy research organization, that found that roughly 25 percent of women with private insurance plans said they had paid at least some part of the cost of their birth control; 16 percent reported that their insurance plans had offered partial coverage, and 6 percent noted that their plans did not cover contraceptives at all. Additionally, a 2022 congressional investigation , which analyzed 68 health plans, found that the process to apply for exceptions and have contraceptives covered was “burdensome” for consumers and that insurance companies denied, on average, at least 40 percent of exception requests.

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Title: how to make cross encoder a good teacher for efficient image-text retrieval.

Abstract: Dominant dual-encoder models enable efficient image-text retrieval but suffer from limited accuracy while the cross-encoder models offer higher accuracy at the expense of efficiency. Distilling cross-modality matching knowledge from cross-encoder to dual-encoder provides a natural approach to harness their strengths. Thus we investigate the following valuable question: how to make cross-encoder a good teacher for dual-encoder? Our findings are threefold:(1) Cross-modal similarity score distribution of cross-encoder is more concentrated while the result of dual-encoder is nearly normal making vanilla logit distillation less effective. However ranking distillation remains practical as it is not affected by the score distribution.(2) Only the relative order between hard negatives conveys valid knowledge while the order information between easy negatives has little significance.(3) Maintaining the coordination between distillation loss and dual-encoder training loss is beneficial for knowledge transfer. Based on these findings we propose a novel Contrastive Partial Ranking Distillation (CPRD) method which implements the objective of mimicking relative order between hard negative samples with contrastive learning. This approach coordinates with the training of the dual-encoder effectively transferring valid knowledge from the cross-encoder to the dual-encoder. Extensive experiments on image-text retrieval and ranking tasks show that our method surpasses other distillation methods and significantly improves the accuracy of dual-encoder.

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• Tell Me, ChatGPT, Is This a Melanoma?

Marie-Line Barbet, Dr

July 10, 2024

In September 2023, a new feature was added to ChatGPT (OpenAI) that allows the analysis of images, including those obtained through dermatoscopy. This version of ChatGPT might help clinicians identify the nature of skin lesions, but its ability to do so must be verified.

In a letter to the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology , a team reported its experience in exploring the performance of ChatGPT Vision in diagnosing melanoma from dermatoscopic images.

Dermoscopic images, including cases confirmed by melanoma and benign nevi histopathology, were extracted from the archives of the International Skin Imaging Collaboration. The images were submitted to ChatGPT Vision with a request for three differential diagnoses to be ranked from most to least likely.

The diagnosis deemed most likely was compared with the histopathologic diagnosis. The researchers also determined whether the correct diagnosis was among ChatGPT's top three diagnoses. Finally, the ability of ChatGPT Vision to differentiate between benign and malignant lesions was investigated.

A total of 100 melanocytic lesions, including 50 melanomas and 50 non-atypical benign nevi, were used in the study. Considering the first diagnosis provided by ChatGPT Vision, the sensitivity was 32%, specificity was 40%, and overall diagnostic accuracy was 36%. The correct diagnosis was in the top three of the differential diagnoses with a sensitivity of 56%, specificity of 53%, and precision of 55%.

Regarding ChatGPT's ability to differentiate between malignant and benign lesions, the sensitivity, specificity, and precision were 46%, 78%, and 62%, respectively, for the diagnosis deemed most likely and 78%, 47%, and 62% for the top three diagnoses proposed by the chatbot.

These results show that the performance of ChatGPT Vision is significantly below that of approved artificial intelligence algorithms for diagnosing melanoma from dermatoscopic images. The risk for missing a melanoma and incorrectly classifying a lesion as malignant is too high to use ChatGPT in clinical practice.

Certainly, this study is limited by the small number of lesions used, among which dysplastic lesions were absent, and the lack of consideration of various essential data (such as the anatomical site of the tumor, type of nevus, and melanoma thickness).

Therefore, ChatGPT is not sufficiently effective for the diagnosis of melanoma, even if it can at least help describe images. Or should we say not yet sufficiently effective?

This story was translated from JIM , which is part of the Medscape Professional Network, using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.

Send comments and news tips to [email protected] .

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