Online Safety Act: Revenge porn to be classified as most serious online offence in crackdown

The sharing of revenge porn is to be classified as the most serious type of online offence under the Online Safety Act, meaning social media platforms will now have to take steps proactively to remove it, the government has said.

The change to the law will see the sharing of intimate images without consent upgraded to be made a priority offence under the new online safety rules, which are due to come into force from spring next year.

Under the laws, material considered a priority offence - which also includes public order offences and the sale of weapons and drugs online - must not only be removed when it is found online, but platforms must also proactively remove it and take steps to prevent it from appearing in the first place - with large fines for those who fail to do so.

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The government said it hoped the crackdown would help drive the development of new and existing technologies to help keep people safer online, while also helping to tackle sexual offending and the normalisation of misogynistic material being shared online.

Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said he hoped requiring social media platforms to take more proactive action would “drive behaviour change” and "prevent it happening in the first place".

Mr Kyle told ITV News: "The people who work for these companies, they have daughters, they have women in their families and very many of them will have experienced this themselves, or the threat of it.

"Many of them want to take action."

He added that the safety of our citizens "must come first" and that's why he is backing it up with the law.

He said companies will be forced to ensure their algorithms prevent this content from going live in the first place to "protect thousands, if not millions, of women in particular".

"They are going to have to prove that they are taking these measures and that’s really important, so we can put the onus on them to proactively root out this content."

'Many of these companies want to take action,' says Technology Secretary Peter Kyle

If the content is uploaded onto their platforms and they are found to have violated the government regulations, Mr Kyle said they would be "open to a huge fine".

“And then of course, for those people who do create this content, we will have more powers to act against them as well, because that will be a criminal offence."

Mr Kyle said the introduction of the Online Safety Act would make safety an “unignorable issue” for social media companies, warning “they can no longer just look the other way or have other priorities”.

The technology secretary also confirmed he would be “introducing legislation on frontier AI in this Parliament”, saying he did not want to see “new products and innovations crash into society and being negatively disruptive” and it then taking a “long time for us as legislators and regulators to catch up”.

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