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

Deepfake nudes and “revenge porn” must be removed from the internet within 48 hours or tech companies risk being blocked in the UK, Keir Starmer has said, calling it a “national emergency” that the government must address.

Companies could face fines of millions, or even a complete ban, if they allow the images to be distributed or republished after victims provide notice.

Changes will be made to the Crime and Policing Bill to also regulate AI chatbots such as X’s Grok, which were generating 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 tackling abuse must no longer fall on victims. It must fall on perpetrators and the companies that enable harm.”

The Prime Minister said institutional misogyny being “woven into the fabric of our institutions” meant the problem had not been taken seriously enough. “Too often, misogyny is excused, downplayed 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 to enforce by the summer and that companies will be legally required to remove such content no later than 48 hours after it is reported to them.

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

Victims could report the images either directly to tech companies or to Ofcom, which would trigger an alert across multiple platforms, according to the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology.

Ofcom would be responsible for enforcing the ban on the images, with the aim of removing the onus on victims of having to report the same image potentially thousands of times as it is continually republished.

The media regulator will be asked to explore ways for “revenge porn” images to have a digital watermark to allow them to be automatically flagged each time they are republished.

Internet service providers will also receive new guidelines on how to block hosting of malicious sites that specialize in hosting real non-consensual or explicit AI-generated content.

The Grok “nudification” tool which sparked an outcry in early January saw ministers threaten to ban X if it did not act. According to an analysis for the Guardian, around 6,000 bikini requests were made to the chatbot every hour, with many requests aimed at creating images of women bending over or simply flossing.

But there has also been a rise in recent years in the number of non-consensual real or deepfake images used to blackmail young women and men, which charities have linked to a number of suicides.

Starmer said the horror stories of women and girls who saw intimate images posted on the internet were “the kind of story that, as a parent, makes your heart drop to your stomach”.

“Too often, these victims have been left to fight alone – chasing the action from one site to another, reporting the same information again and again, only to see it reappear somewhere else hours later,” the Prime Minister said. “It’s not justice. It’s a failure. And it sends a message to the young people of this country that women and girls are a commodity that must be used and shared.”

Creating or sharing non-consensual intimate images will also become a “priority offence” under the Online Safety Act, giving it the same level of seriousness as images of child abuse or terrorism. The law does not require platforms to independently identify non-consensual intimate images, only to remove such images when they are reported.

Google, Meta, And while the 48-hour deadline is brief, India recently required social media companies to remove certain deepfake content within three hours.

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

“The problem is that this doesn’t necessarily incentivize a faster response from companies. But 48 hours is longer than the time frame for removing other types of content, such as terrorist content in the EU.”

Craanen added that there are already initiatives to use hash matching to protect victims of intimate violence; although it can be difficult to coordinate different technology platforms with each other, so that an abusive video uploaded to Facebook, for example, is automatically detected on Reddit.

Hash matching is not a perfect technology, Craanen pointed out, and can be circumvented. Terrorist groups, for example, often add emojis or small edits to videos already hashed as terrorist content, making them unrecognizable to hashing systems.

The advent of AI tools and AI deepfakes will exacerbate this problem, allowing intimate images and other non-consensual content to be quickly altered and distributed across the Internet, Craanen said, avoiding attempts at rapid detection with tools such as hash matching. In a moment like January’s Grok bikinification crisis, some abuse might be impossible to control.

Although the law appears to apply to all technology platforms, including “malicious websites” which do not fall under the Online Safety Act, questions arise over how it might apply to encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal.

In his post, Starmer said he was also determined to tackle misogyny in government and politics, following several weeks where the Prime Minister was criticized for appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador, amid knowledge of his friendship with disgraced financier and pedophile Jeffery Epstein. Mandelson was fired after new revelations about the closeness of their friendship.

The prime minister also faces a dispute over the appointment of a new cabinet secretary, Antonia Romeo, who is expected to become the interior ministry’s permanent secretary, who was cleared of bullying allegations nine years ago but remains a divisive figure in the civil service. Some of his defenders said Romeo’s criticisms were based on sexist double standards.

Starmer suggested he wanted to appoint more women to senior roles in government and said he was “determined to transform the culture of government: to challenge the structures which still marginalize women’s voices”.

“And that’s why I think it’s not enough to just count the number of women in leadership positions,” he said. “What matters is whether their opinions carry weight and lead to change. »