Fighting the beast of image-based sexual abuse

Let's turn towards, um, the, the UK's legal response to the problem in, into more details.

You, you've mentioned a new act.

In your article, you identify what sounds like a significant gap.

Um, the Online Safety Act itself actually envisions proactive measures, but Ofcom, which is the UK independent regulatory and, uh, competition authority for the communications industry, um, has a code of practice that only mandates what big platforms are already doing.

Um, so how did that gap open up?

So I guess initially Ofcom was ... 'cause an enormous task, because the Online Safety Act, as its title suggests, has the purpose of make the internet safety.

So its scope of application is extremely broad, ranging from, you know, suicide, self-harm, knife crime, um, harmful, um, memes which children might follow, through to, um, sexual abuse, hate speech, terrorist content, child sexual, sexual abuse.

So, so it's a long, long, broad act which covers many types of different content.

So it does that, and then the other issue I think Ofcom had to face was, um, that it basically has to allow innovation, but at the same time restrict illegal content and content which is harmful to children.

So there is clearly a, a tension here between, I guess, fundamental rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of expression, uh, privacy on the one hand, and harm prevention or illegal content prevention.

So Ofcom reacted to this tension, I think, in a very cautious way, initially focusing mainly on children s- child sexual abuse, so sexual content concerning children, as well as terrorist content, and it was mandated by government to focus on these two areas as priority areas.

And also, um, you know, pornography websites to prevent child access to those websites.

I think these were the enforcement priorities, and everything else was e- even if that wasn't expressly stated, but it was left more or less to self-regulation.

In other words, the platforms themselves instituting the measures.

Now, in relation to the abuse of, and I am talking about adults, uh, women, and obviously some men too, through intimate images, that has caused so much harm on so many dimensions that now I think the government finally has recognized that.

And again, the Crime and Policing Act actually now classifies this content as priority content, so that Ofcom in the future, and we don't quite know how this will work out, will have to take a more proactive approach.

But to my mind, that has been the main problem exactly, that Ofcom has been very passive, has just left this more or less to standards being developed by the platforms themselves, which were really inadequate, as we have seen with, uh, XAI and Grok on, on X, which had millions and millions of deepfakes abusing images, because obviously you can create a deepfake just by a simple image of one person, um, and then overlaying that with, with a sexual act, or you can, uh, unclothe people, et cetera, et cetera.

And that has led to enormous abuse, especially of, of women, and especially also of women politicians, for example.

Thank you.

Um, that makes a lot of sense about the very wide remit, uh, that Ofcom is, is working with.

Um, you propose in your articles a new dedicated co-regulatory body separate from Ofcom to manage a unified IBSA hash database.

Why can't Ofcom do that job itself?

I think Ofcom, its remit is probably too broad.

It's kind of a super regulator, and all these issues are comparatively serious issues, right? I mean, self-harm, knife crime, hate speech, et cetera, et cetera.

Ofcom is also obviously the, the broadcast regulator.