Tech firms must remove ‘revenge porn’ in 48 hours or risk being blocked, says Starmer | Violence against women and girls

Keir Starmer said deepfake nudes and “revenge porn” must be removed from the internet within 48 hours or tech companies risk being blocked in the UK, describing it as a “national emergency” the government must confront.

Companies that allow images to be disseminated or republished after victims report them could be fined millions or even blocked entirely.

The crime and policing bill will also make changes to regulate artificial intelligence chatbots such as X’s Grok, which produces non-consensual images of women in bikinis or in indecent positions until the government threatens action against Elon Musk’s company.

Writing for the Guardian, Starmer said: “The burden of tackling abuse must no longer fall on the shoulders of victims. It must fall on the shoulders of perpetrators and the companies that enable the harm.”

The Prime Minister said the fact that institutional misogyny was “woven into the fabric of our institutions” meant the problem was not being taken seriously enough. “Misogyny is often excused, minimized or ignored. Women’s arguments are dismissed as exaggerated or ‘one-off’. This culture creates permission,” Starmer wrote.

Government sources said they expected to give the new powers to Ofcom by the summer and that companies would be legally required to remove content within 48 hours of it being flagged to them.

Platforms that fail to take appropriate action, including social media companies and pornography sites, could face fines of up to 10% of their current worldwide revenue or have their services blocked in the UK.

Victims will be able to flag images directly with tech firms or Ofcom, which will trigger an alert across multiple platforms, according to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

Ofcom will be responsible for enforcing the ban on the images, to avoid victims having to report the same image potentially thousands of times as it is constantly reshared.

The media regulator will be told to investigate ways to include a digital watermark that would allow “revenge porn” images to be automatically flagged each time they are republished.

Internet providers will also be given new guidance on how to block hosting for rogue sites that specialize in hosting sexually explicit non-consensual real or AI-generated content.

Grok’s “nudification” tool sparked huge backlash in early January, prompting ministers to threaten to ban X if it didn’t take action. According to analysis for the Guardian, around 6,000 bikini requests were being made to the chatbot every hour; Many requests were made to create images of women bending over or simply flossing.

But in recent years there has also been an increase in the use of non-consensual real or deepfake images to blackmail young men and women. Which charities have been linked to a number of suicides?.

Starmer said the horror stories of women and girls who saw intimate images going viral were “the kind of story that will make your heart sink into your stomach as a parent”.

“Too often these victims were left to fight alone; they chased sites of action, reporting the same material over and over again, only to find themselves reappearing hours later somewhere else,” the Prime Minister said. “This is not justice. It is failure. And it sends a message to the youth of this country that women and girls are commodities to be used and shared.”

The creation or sharing of intimate images without consent will also become a “priority offense” under the Online Safety Act, giving it the same level of seriousness as child abuse images or terrorism. The law does not require platforms to independently identify non-consensual intimate images, only to remove them when flagged.

Google, Meta, X and others already do this for child sexual abuse content through a process called hash matching, which assigns videos a unique digital signature that can be matched against databases of malicious content. While the 48-hour timeline is short, India will soon compulsory Social media companies remove some deepfake content within three hours.

“I think 48 hours is definitely possible, to be honest,” said Anne Craanen, who researches online misogyny at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

“The problem is that this may not encourage companies to respond faster. But 48 hours is longer than the time required to remove other types of content, such as terrorist content in the EU.”

There are also some already available, Craanen added. initiatives using mixed matching to protect victims of intimate abuse; Although it is difficult to ensure that different technology platforms coordinate among themselves, for example, a malicious video uploaded to Facebook can be automatically detected on Reddit.

Craanen emphasized that hybrid matching is not a perfect technology and can be circumvented. For example, terrorist groups often add emojis or small changes to videos that have already been hashed as terrorist content, making them unrecognizable to hash matching systems.

Craanen said the emergence of AI tools and AI deepfakes will exacerbate this problem, allowing non-consensual intimate images and other content to be quickly altered and spread across the internet, avoiding attempts to quickly detect it with tools such as hash matching. In a moment like the Grok bikini crisis in January, some abuses may be impossible to contain.

While the law appears to apply to all technology platforms, including “rogue websites” that fall outside the purview of the Online Security Act, there are questions about how it might apply to encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal.

Starmer said in his article that he was also determined to challenge misogyny in government and politics, just weeks after the prime minister faced criticism over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador despite knowledge of his friendship with disgraced financier and child sex offender Jeffery Epstein. Mandelson was fired following new revelations about the closeness of their friendship.

The Prime Minister is also facing a row over the appointment of new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo, who is tipped to become permanent secretary of the Home Office, who was cleared of bullying allegations nine years ago but remains a divisive figure in the civil service. Some of its defenders have said that criticism of Romeo is based on sexist double standards.

Starmer suggested he wanted to appoint more women to senior leadership roles in government and said he was “committed to transforming the culture of government, challenging the structures that still marginalize women’s voices”.

“That’s why I believe it’s not enough to count how many women are in senior positions,” she said. “What matters is whether their views carry weight and lead to change.”