UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has issued a new deadline for social media companies. Starmer has given social media companies, including Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), Meta, TikTok, and others, 48 hours to remove non-consensual intimate images from their platforms. He has also warned companies that fail to comply could be blocked in the country.In a post shared on the microblogging site X, Starmer called revenge porn “utterly abhorrent,” and said the government had already moved to curb the misuse of the AI tool Grok after users were found generating “vile” images through its image feature. He said violence against women and girls is unacceptable in society and added that further action on the issue would follow.In his X post, Starmer wrote, “The sharing of non-consensual intimate images is utterly abhorrent. That’s why when we learnt people were using the AI tool Grok to make vile images, we moved quickly to get it stopped. Today, we are going further. We are putting social media companies on notice to take down any non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours. I know there’s more to do. Violence against women and girls has no place in our society. We must root it out.”

What measures the UK government may take against social media companies that fail to comply

According to a report by The Guardian, social media companies in the UK could face fines running into millions or be blocked entirely if they fail to remove non-consensual intimate images after victims formally give notice. The platforms will be held responsible if such content continues to spread or is reposted despite the clear notice from the affected parties, which emphasises the government’s efforts to ensure stricter enforcement and faster resolution.The UK PM added that amendments will also be made to the crime and policing bill to regulate AI chatbots such as X’s Grok, which generated non-consensual images of women in bikinis or in compromising positions until the government threatened action against Elon Musk’s company.“The burden of tackling abuse must no longer fall on victims. It must fall on perpetrators and on the companies that enable harm,” he told The Guardian.Grok AI has faced criticism and regulatory scrutiny in several other countries for its ability to generate sexualised and non-consensual images of women, including Ireland, India, and Malaysia, as well as the European Union.Victims of revenge porn will be able to report the images either directly to tech companies or to the Office of Communications (Ofcom), according to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Once a complaint is made, an alert can be sent across multiple platforms to help ensure the images are taken down more quickly and not reshared elsewhere.Ofcom, an independent regulatory and competition authority for the UK’s communications industries, has been given responsibility for enforcing the ban on such images, removing the onus on victims to report the same image potentially thousands of times as it is continually reposted, the report added.