Last month Parliament finally approved the passing of the Online Safety Bill.
As we wait for the Bill to receive Royal Assent attention is now turning to how the new provisions will be implemented, and how quickly the Bill can give protection to those who become victims of illegal activities such as the non-consensual sharing of intimate images.
The new Bill contains some key additional protections for those who find their private images shared online without their consent.
If found guilty of this horrible and deeply distressing crime a person will face a jail term.
And for the first time, the sharing of ‘deep fake’ intimate images – explicit images or videos which have been digitally manipulated to look like someone else – will also be criminalised.
In addition, thanks to the support of campaigners, newspapers such as the Daily Express, MPs, Peers and Ministers, the Bill requires the highest-risk online platforms to follow guidance which will be set out by the online regulator, Ofcom, about how women and girls can feel safe online rather than it being a wild west of misogyny and hateful content, including in the worst cases where someone’s private and intimate pictures have gone viral.
But putting this guidance in place and prosecuting the offences under the new provisions will take time.
Meanwhile, women and girls are finding that someone they trusted with an intimate image has abused that trust and shared those images on websites dedicated to spreading such abuse. These sites exist solely to violate consent.
And we can see they are growing into thriving businesses. Big tech companies are enabling and profiting off this abuse even while they claim they have policies about harmful content. Instead, they could already be blocking these sites.
Big tech companies don’t have to wait for Ofcom to publish codes of practice or guidance or for Ministers to make regulations.
They’ve heard the debates in Parliament and the distress of victims. They shouldn’t be waiting to be told how to behave and how to take down harmful and violating content. It is time these big tech platforms and search engines did the right thing and started to make the internet safer for women and girls by tackling the growth of sites who do nothing but exploit the distress of victims of this particular online crime.
