Tech firms to face stricter laws in how they handle abusive images

New laws to protect women and girls from abuse will put greater pressure on tech firms to remove non-consensual intimate images on their platforms.

Through an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, companies will be legally required to remove intimate images shared without a subject’s consent no more than 48 hours after it is flagged to them. Plans are currently being considered by Ofcom for these kinds of images to be treated with the same severity as child sexual abuse and terrorism content, digitally marking them so that any time someone tries to repost them, they will be automatically taken down, and ensuring victims only need to flag content in a single instance to have it removed from multiple platforms.

Tech firms that fail to act could face fines of up to 10% of their qualifying worldwide revenue or having their services blocked in the UK.

Alongside these changes, new guidance is also set to published for internet service providers to set out how they should block access to sites hosting illegal content, in particular, targeting websites falling outside the reach of the Online Safety Act.

The amendment follows outrage at AI ‘nudification’ tools included as part of X’s Grok AI image generation features, which has since been removed. Ministers are also legislating to make such features illegal and bringing chatbots within scope of the Online Safety Act.