Tech firms will be ordered to remove “revenge porn” within 48 hours or risk being fined or banned from the UK under proposed laws announced by ministers.
Through an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, the government will make it a legal requirement for companies to take down intimate images shared without a victim’s consent no more than 48 hours after it is flagged to them.
If they fail to do so, they would face fines of up to 10 per cent of their global revenue, or risk having their services blocked in the UK.
Sir Keir Starmer said he was putting tech firms “on notice”.
“The online world is the front line of the 21st-century battle against violence against women and girls. That’s why my government is taking urgent action: against chatbots and ‘nudification’ tools,” he said.
“Today, we are going further, putting companies on notice so that any non-consensual image is taken down in under 48 hours.
“Violence against women and girls has no place in our society, and I will not rest until it is rooted out.”
The new measures also mean victims will only need to report an image once rather than across multiple websites, and it will be automatically deleted if there is a new upload.
The government said plans are also being considered by regulator Ofcom for intimate images shared without a victim’s consent to be classed similarly to child sexual abuse and terrorism content, meaning they would be digitally marked and automatically removed if someone tried to repost them.
Victims’ minister Alex Davies-Jones explained the government will use hash matching, which is used for the detection of known illegal or harmful images and videos across the internet
She told Sky News: “We’ll be using something called hash matching, which is similar to terrorist content or child sexual abuse content so that it can be taken down on every platform, so you as a victim don’t have to report it to every single platform time and again to try and get that taken down.”
Technology secretary Liz Kendall said the days of tech firms “having a free pass are over”.
She said: “No woman should have to chase platform after platform, waiting days for an image to come down. Under this government, you report once and you’re protected everywhere.
“The internet must be a space where women and girls feel safe, respected, and able to thrive.”
The measures come weeks after Sir Keir battled X’s Grok AI tool amid concerns it had been used to generate sexualised images of women and children.
The prime minister indicated at the time that the social media platform could be blocked in the UK after “unlawful” and “disgusting” images were generated using the tool.
