Sharing of deep fakes will be illegal in the UK under a new online safety bill.
- The UK government will introduce further legislation to address abusive online behaviour.
- These regulations will apply to 'downblousing'.
- These follow earlier initiatives to criminalise upskirting.
People who share so-called 'deepfakes,' which are sexually explicit images or videos that have been altered to resemble someone else without that person's consent,
will be among the first to be specifically criminalised under a planned amendment to the UK's new
Online Safety Bill, and they could spend time in jail.
The UK government announced that it will also introduce a package of new regulations to combat a variety of abusive online behaviours, such as the installation of tools like covert cameras to take or record pictures of people without their permission. These will cover the practise known as 'downblousing,' in which a woman's top is photographed without her knowledge or consent.
The Online Safety Bill amendment aims to expand the definition of current intimate image offences so that more offenders will be prosecuted and may receive jail time. A quarter of adults in England and Wales have reported receiving threats to share intimate photos, according to official statistics. Police have received more than 28,000 reports of people disclosing private sexual images without permission between April 2015 and December 2021.
To protect women and girls from individuals who alter or capture intimate pictures of them in an effort to harass or degrade them, more needs to be done.
UK deputy prime minister and justice secretary Dominic Raab asserted that his amendments would provide police and prosecutors the power they need to hold these cowards accountable and defend women and girls from such horrible abuse.
The most recent MoJ reform plan comes in response to mounting worries on a global scale about the misuse of new technology, notably the rise in 'deepfakes.' These frequently involve creating and disseminating false, frequently pornographic, images or videos of a person using editing software without that person's consent.
