'Would Keir Starmer Be Happy For A Nude Image Of Him To Be Live For 48 Hours?'

For decades, victims have been suffering the consequences of degrading behaviour.

Revenge porn, deep fakes and more recently, images produced by X’s AI bot Grok, have put people onto a public stage in an incredibly vulnerable way that they did not ask for.

The rise in misogyny, in a world where many boys today think that feminism has gone far enough, coupled with developments in AI that enable people to remove a person’s clothes or to generate tailored porn, is terrifying.

It’s clear that we need new strict guardrails in place, which is what the government is attempting to do.

Keir Starmer announced this week that tech companies must remove “revenge porn” and deepfake nudes within a 48-hour window or their whole platform could be blocked and they could be fined millions.

This is welcome news. For years, victims have pleaded for these images and videos to come down, begging the police, the website owners and anyone who will listen to remove content that they did not consent to sharing, and then fighting for justice against their perpetrators.

These pleas have often fallen on deaf ears with victims feeling totally powerless against the internet, which never forgets you.

Action, not words, is what we need to see here. The huge positive here is that the government is shifting the shame by putting pressure on tech giants and companies to act and to protect victims over profits.

It is good to see that this is finally being taken seriously and that it is not just targeting social media sites, but a range of tech platforms. 

But the most important thing is that they follow up with something robust enough to make change happen at a systems level.

It’s hard to know if the regulator Ofcom has the level of resources to manage the massive rise in generated content and all the new platforms and apps appearing.

They have a mammoth task ahead of them to be able to capture and control every single piece of content that lands. This is not a ‘job done’ solution; we need to go further and stop this content from being created and shared at all. 

48 hours makes a good headline – but it is a huge amount of time for victims to suffer. It takes just seconds to screenshot and share an image.

How long would Keir Starmer want a compromising video or nude photo of himself online? I suspect 48 seconds would be too long.

Tech companies have put profit before harm since their inception, and it’s been the survivors and campaigners who’ve been pushing for years for accountability. In many ways, it’s about time we got proactive.

But what’s crucial is that we don’t accept this as a radical solution.

We should see this as an initial stepping stone, because I think we can all agree that victims deserve more than this.