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The two most popular hashtags relating to allegations against a BBC presenter have been posted almost 45,000 times on Twitter since Friday.
Sky News has analysed data that shows the scale of discussion on Twitter and TikTok around the claims.
The volume of posts raises questions over how effective privacy and defamation laws are in the social media era, with experts telling Sky News it reveals a lack of public understanding of the consequences of sharing false claims about individuals online.
BBC presenter latest: New claims against presenter
On Friday, The Sun newspaper published allegations that the unnamed presenter paid a teenager thousands of pounds for sexually explicit photos.
The claims were made by the mother of the young person, who is now aged 20.
In the days since, two hashtags have been used frequently by people discussing the case online.
One hashtag has been posted on Twitter more than 32,700 times and the other 12,000 times, from 7 July to Tuesday morning, according to data gathered by Sky News from Talkwalker, a social listening platform.
The posts all came from accounts belonging to people in the UK.
Content using the same two hashtags have been viewed around six million times on TikTok over the past seven days, according to the platform’s own insights dashboard.
Both social media platforms have been rife with speculation and a number of names are being openly discussed. This prompted some BBC presenters to issue public denials that they are the subject of the complaint.
BBC 5 Live presenter Nicky Campbell shared a screenshot of a report to the Metropolitan Police after what he said was a “distressing weekend”, during which he had been falsely accused by social media users of being involved in the scandal.
Gary Lineker, Rylan Clark and Jeremy Vine also took to Twitter to refute the false allegations about them online.
“I won’t sit back and have my name…
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