Keir Starmer has said that deepfake nudes and “revenge porn” must be removed from the internet within 48 hours or technology companies risk being blocked in the UK, calling it a “national emergency” that the government must confront.
If companies allow images to be spread or reposted after victims notify them, they could be fined millions or even be blocked entirely.
Amendments will be made to the Crime and Police Bill to also regulate AI chatbots like X-Grok, which generated non-consensual images of women in bikinis or in compromising positions until the government threatened action against Elon Musk’s company.
Writing for the Guardian, Starmer said: “The burden of dealing with abuse should no longer fall on victims. It should fall on perpetrators and the companies who cause harm.”
The Prime Minister said institutionalized misogyny is “woven into the fabric of our institutions” which means the problem is not taken seriously enough. “Too often, misogyny is excused, minimized or ignored. Women’s arguments are dismissed as exaggerated or ‘one-sided’. That culture breeds permission,” Starmer wrote.
Government sources said they expected Ofcom to be given new powers to enforce by the summer and companies would be legally required to remove content no more than 48 hours after being flagged.
Social media companies and platforms including pornography sites that fail to take action could face fines of up to 10% of their eligible worldwide revenue or have their services blocked in the UK.
According to the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, victims will be able to flag the images either directly with the tech firms or with Ofcom – which will trigger alerts across multiple platforms.
Ofcom will be responsible for enforcing restrictions on images, with the aim of eliminating the responsibility for victims to report the same image potentially thousands of times as it is continually reposted.
The media regulator will be asked to explore ways of placing a digital watermark for “revenge porn” images so that they can be automatically marked every time they are re-posted.
Internet providers will also be given new guidance on how to block the hosting of rogue sites that specialize in hosting non-consensual real or AI-generated explicit content.
The Grok “nudification” tool caused an uproar in early January, with ministers threatening to ban X unless action was taken. According to analysis conducted for the Guardian, about 6,000 bikinis were being requested on the chatbot every hour, with many requests being made to create images of women bent over or wearing only dental floss.
But in recent years there has also been a rise in non-consensual real or deeply fake images being used to blackmail young women and men. Which charities have been linked to a number of suicides.
Starmer said the horror stories of women and girls who saw intimate photos spread on the Internet were “the kind of story that, as a parent, tugs at your heartstrings”.
“Too often, those victims are left to fight alone – chasing the crackdown from site to site, reporting the same content again and again, only to see it again hours later somewhere else,” the Prime Minister said. “This is not justice. This is a failure. And it is sending a message to the youth of this country that women and girls are objects to be used and shared.”
Creating or sharing non-consensual intimate images would also become a “priority offence” under the Online Safety Act, giving it the same severity as child abuse images or terrorism. The law does not require platforms to independently identify non-consensual intimate images, but only to remove these images if flagged.
Google, Meta, and while the 48-hour deadline is brief, India has recently Mandatory That social media companies remove some deepfake content within three hours.
“To be honest, I think 48 hours is definitely possible,” said Anne Crennan, who researches online misogyny at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
“The problem is that it may not necessarily encourage a quick response rate from companies. But other types of content, such as terrorist content in the EU, have a longer 48-hour time limit for removal.”
Crannan said these already exist Initiative Using hash matching to protect victims of intimate abuse; However, it can be challenging to coordinate different technology platforms so that, for example, an offensive video uploaded to Facebook can be automatically detected on Reddit.
Hash matching is not an ideal technique, Crennan stressed, and can be avoided. For example, terrorist groups often add emojis or small variations to videos already hashed as terrorist content, making them unrecognizable to hash matching systems.
This problem will get worse with the advent of AI tools and AI deepfakes, allowing non-consensual intimate images and other content to be quickly altered and spread across the Internet, Crennan said, bypassing efforts to immediately detect it with tools like hash matching. In a moment like the January Groke bikinification crisis, some abuses may be impossible to rein in.
While the law appears to apply to all tech platforms, including “rogue websites,” which are outside the reach of the Online Security Act, there are questions about how it might apply to encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal.
In her article, Starmer said she was also committed to challenging misogyny in government and politics, following several weeks where the Prime Minister has faced criticism for appointing Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador despite knowledge of his friendship with disgraced financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Mendelson was fired after new revelations about the closeness of their friendship.
The Prime Minister is also facing controversy over the appointment of the new Cabinet Secretary, Antonia Romo, who has been described as the permanent Secretary of the Home Office, having been cleared of bullying allegations nine years ago but remains a divisive figure in the civil service. Some of his defenders have said that criticism of Romo is based on gender double standards.
Starmer suggested she wanted to appoint more women to senior leadership roles in government and said she was determined to “change the culture of government: to challenge the structures that still marginalize women’s voices”.
“And that’s why I believe just counting how many women are in senior roles is not enough,” she said. “What matters is whether their ideas matter and lead to change.”
