OSAN welcomes action to protect women and girls online
Today the Government has announced that it will introduce new measures to better protect women and girls online by forcing tech companies to remove harmful images more quickly.
The Government plans to introduce amendments into the Crime and Policing Bill that will ensure that platforms are legally required to remove NCII content no more than 48 hours after it is flagged to them, and platforms that fail to act could face fines of up to 10% of their qualifying worldwide revenue or having their services blocked in the UK.
The Online Safety Act Network (OSAN) welcomes this commitment, which follows the tireless campaigning of survivors such as Jodie*, alongside the End Violence Against Women Coalition, Revenge Porn Helpline, #NotYourPorn, Professor Clare McGlynn, and Glamour UK. We back calls by SWGfL and Baroness Owen to strengthen these proposals by introducing a statutory register of non-consensual intimate images which would introduce a comprehensive, “regulated source of verified NCII hashes that platforms and internet service providers must use to block access and prevent further distribution”.
At the same time, Ofcom has announced that it is bringing forward measures on hash matching, a proactive technology used for detection of NCII images including deepfakes, that were proposed in Ofcom’s additional safety measures consultation in the Autumn of last year. Ofcom have confirmed in their press release that they expect any new Illegal Harms Code measures to come into effect this Summer, subject to the parliamentary process. We are pleased to see the acceleration of the timeline for bringing these measures into force and exhort Ofcom to ensure that - in line with the Government’s commitment to halve violence against women and girls - an enforcement programme on these measures is opened as soon as possible.
The Government will also publish guidance for internet providers setting out how they should block access to sites hosting this content, targeting smaller websites that may fall outside the scope of the Online Safety Act (OSA). We are pleased to see consideration of a more ambitious approach to tackling these “rogue” sites. We would encourage the government to go further to consider how this approach could be applied to other harmful sites such as sites promoting racist content or content promoting suicide, as per our recommendation in our 10 point plan to strengthen the OSA.
We would welcome further discussions with the Government about our recommendation for a ‘stay down’ provision, which would clarify that content which has been identified as illegal content and removed should stay down from then on, such that subsequent shares do not require the same moderation process to be followed. This would capture other forms of online VAWG such as stalking, harassment and domestic abuse.
The announcements today are a positive signal that the Government is willing to listen to the needs of survivors and campaigners about what mechanisms are needed to contribute to their halving VAWG mission. Next we need to see more done by platforms to stop content being shared in the first place and to enable Ofcom to enforce the OSA to its fullest. Whilst we await further detail on the proposals, we hope to engage with Government departments on how the measures fully meet the needs of survivors and hold tech platforms to account.
