UK mandates 48-hour takedowns for non-consensual intimate images

UK ministers want tech platforms to remove non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours of being flagged, or face penalties including fines of up to 10% of global revenue and potential blocking, according to The Independent. The proposal—an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill—also promises “report once, delete everywhere,” with regulator Ofcom considering treating such images similarly to child sexual abuse material and terrorism content.

The technical mechanism being floated is hash matching: once an image is identified, platforms generate a digital fingerprint so re-uploads can be automatically detected and removed. As the government’s victims’ minister Alex Davies-Jones told Sky News, the intent is to spare victims from chasing takedowns across multiple sites.

The 48-hour clock is less a victim-support measure than a censorship deadline. It forces platforms to build always-on intake pipelines, identity verification around reporters, rapid adjudication, and automated enforcement at scale. That is expensive, legally risky, and operationally brittle—especially in edge cases: altered images, screenshots, crops, re-encodes, and deepfakes designed to evade hashing. The more robust the matching (perceptual hashing, model-based similarity), the higher the false-positive risk. And under a strict statutory deadline, platforms will optimize for minimizing liability, not maximizing accuracy.

The government’s own language gestures at the endgame: classify more categories of content as “must-remove everywhere,” then require cross-platform coordination. That produces two outcomes. First, overblocking: automated systems will remove lawful content that resembles flagged material (journalism, satire, evidence shared for reporting, or even consensual images misreported). Second, consolidation: only the largest firms can afford moderation-at-scale, legal review, and compliance reporting. Smaller services will either geoblock the UK, shut down user uploads, or outsource moderation to the same handful of vendors—creating a de facto oligopoly of compliance.

The policy also blurs the line between private platforms and public enforcement. If a service can be blocked for missing a 48-hour deadline, it will build privileged channels for “trusted flaggers” and law enforcement. That is governance by backchannel: a public function—speech adjudication—performed by private actors without transparency obligations, meaningful appeal rights, or the evidentiary standards that normally constrain the state.

Britain is not inventing this model so much as perfecting it: regulate speech by deadline, automate enforcement, and call the casualties “collateral.”