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UK to force social media to remove abusive pics in 48 hours

39 points by beardyw

by pjc50

0 subcomment

Actual non-reg statement: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tech-firms-will-have-to-t...
The key phrase is "non-consensual intimate image" commonly known as "revenge porn". It seems this includes fakes as well.
Edit: full text of draft legislation https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/crime-and-policing... ; still very much in the process of being amended.
I note that publishing NCII is already an offence in Scotland, although it doesn't have this kind of liability for platforms. Primarily used against ex-partners publishing real or fake revenge images.

by silexia

0 subcomment

This is just another tactic to bring censorship and intimidation against free speech.

by logankeenan

3 subcomments

Regardless of how you feel about content moderation, 48 hours is a ridiculously long time given what AI can do today. That “bad” image could have been propagated around the world to millions of people in that time. It can and should be removed in minutes because AI can evaluate the “bad” image quickly and a human moderator isn’t required anymore. However, the compute costs would eat into profits…
Again, I’m not judging about content moderation, but this is an extremely weak initiative.

by whywhywhywhy

1 subcomments

The threats of demanding the handing over of revenue by ofcom mean nothing. Offenders outside the UK just laugh and ridicule at the demands or block uk traffic which uk people can bypass with a VPN. They have no power to enforce the demands.
You’d have to essentially police all VPN use beyond China levels to get the worst offenders of this.

by throwa356262

1 subcomments

In the meantime, Zoom is refusing to help police track down peddos that use Zoom meetings to broadcast live sexual abuse of children.

by lunias

0 subcomment

I'm not a fan of forcing sites to police themselves. As far as I'm concerned, that's what the police are for. Simply removing such an image does not necessarily mean that the uploader is being held accountable. This also only affects the lowest of IQ predators while creating an additional barrier to entry (regulatory capture) for anyone that wants to run their own "social media site".
Can we also get a legal definition of "social media"? Is that really just as simple as "services which allow multi-directional communication"? Hate to break it to them, but the internet proper is, itself, a service which allows multi-directional communication. No matter how many walled gardens are created, the 1s and 0s will continue to flow unimpeded.

by Frieren

1 subcomments

> The amendment follows outrage over the Elon Musk-owned chatbot Grok's willingness to generate nude or sexualized images of people, mainly women and girls, which forced a climbdown earlier this year.
Laws are reactive. When abuses of the system happen lawmakers need to find ways to minimize the damage. This is one of the reasons that Google used to follow the "do not do evil" doctrine. It was a smart way to minimize regulation. The new big tech has thrown any aparence of morality thru the windows and that creates a strong need to regulate their actions.

by superkuh

6 subcomments

They're both underdefining what "intimate images" means and using the term images instead of photos. So this means they want this to apply to everything that can be represented visually even if it has nothing to do with anything that happened in reality. Which means they don't care about actual harms. The way they're using the word 'harm' seems be to more in line with the word 'offend'. So now in the UK if there is an offensive image (like a painting) posted on a web site (or other internet protocol) they are going to be, " treated with the same severity as child sexual abuse and terrorism content,". That's wild. And dangerous. This policy will do far more damage than any painting or other non-photo images would.

by bArray

2 subcomments

> The UK is bracketing "intimate images shared without a victim's consent" along with terror and child sexual abuse material, and demanding that online platforms remove them within two days.
Bare in mind, this would have been used to stop the Epstein images of the former Prince Andrew from being viewed [1].
> Platforms that do not do so would potentially face fines of 10 percent of "qualifying worldwide income" or have their services blocked in the UK.
Why on earth would it be 10% of their world wide income and not their UK-based income? These politicians really think they have more power than they really do.
> The amendment follows outrage over the Elon Musk-owned chatbot Grok's willingness to generate nude or sexualized images of people, mainly women and girls, which forced a climbdown earlier this year.
The AI didn't just randomly generate NSFW content, it did it at the request of the user. Remember, there was no interest in removing the CP content from Twitter prior to Musk buying it, and then they all moved to Mastodon / BlueSky where they now share that content.
> The government said: "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."
Ofcom simply doesn't have this kind of power. 4chan are showing as much [2]. This is simply massive overreach by the UK government, and I would advise tech giants to stop complying.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g5490xmkeo
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz6ejedj59no

by jgbuddy

1 subcomments

I wonder how 'abusive' is categorized. By some committee maybe?