The UK government says its Online Safety Bill will return to the parliament in December and will be expanded to criminalize nonconsensual “deepfake” pornography
Nonconsensual explicit images to be tackled in bill returning to parliament next month
The GuardianAlex Hern
Context & Ripple Effects
This December return caps a long run-up: the Online Safety Bill has been in the works since 2019, and the deepfake clause answers a gap the Reuters coverage names directly — the UK criminalized revenge porn in 2015, but that law never covered synthetic imagery. It also echoes an older instinct: as far back as the 2016 digital economy bill, UK legislators were trying to align online video standards with offline rules.
What came after confirms the direction of travel. Parliament passed the bill in September 2023, and by April 2024 the UK had gone further still, announcing legislation to outlaw making sexually explicit deepfakes even when the creator never intended to share them.
First-order effects
Victims of nonconsensual deepfake pornography gain a statutory offense covering material the 2015 revenge-porn law left out, once the expanded bill clears parliament in December.
Platforms in scope of the Online Safety Bill take on new compliance exposure around synthetic sexual imagery as the bill moves toward Royal Assent.
Second-order effects
The expansion proved durable: the bill passed in 2023, and the UK then ratcheted further with plans to make both creating and sharing explicit deepfakes crimes, per the 2025 Reuters report — each step narrowing what remains legal.
Hosting and search services must stand up detection-and-removal workflows for AI-generated intimate images ahead of enforcement, since the bill ties penalties to platform duties rather than leaving takedowns voluntary.
Third-order effects
The trajectory runs from punishing distribution (the 2015 revenge-porn law) to punishing creation itself regardless of sharing intent — liability attaching before any image spreads, a structural rewrite of how image-abuse law treats generative tools.
If the pattern holds, other jurisdictions drafting online-safety regimes will treat synthetic sexual content as a named legal category rather than an edge case of harassment or obscenity law, with the UK's sequence as the working template.
The trend: Legislatures are rewriting image-abuse law from distribution offenses toward creation offenses as generative tools make synthetic sexual imagery cheap to produce.
The collateral damage from this “sticking it to big tech” is so so large, but people in charge don't understand the internet. I wrote to my MP @TulipSiddiq in April (https://derickrethans.nl/...), but still haven't gotten an answer. https://twitter.com/...
I'm rather with the Open Rights Group here. We don't need further restrictions on what people are allowed to post, view and read. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
This could be about to happen. I'm not going to take a victory lap just yet, but four Prime Ministers and seven Culture Secretaries later, we may have an Online Safety Law.... https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
...which, by the way, was banned here in Scotland way back in 2010, when you were all still typing on Blackberries and Twitter had 140 characters. It's almost as if playing the ball and not the man makes better public policy. https://twitter.com/...
This terrible overblown unworkable bill needs junking and starting again from scratch. And it needs to be evidence-based, not built on the emotive calls from pressure groups. https://twitter.com/...
In 2014 a young woman from Basingstoke contacted me on behalf of her friend who was a victim of intimate image abuse. Today after 8 years of campaigning Gov to introduce new laws to better protect victims from intimate images abuse https://www.gov.uk/...
Four prime ministers and seven secretaries of state later, the Online Safety Bill is returning. The Government desperately wants to avoid stories about how the Conservative Party remains split over the legislation, so... it's banning “downblousing”. https://www.theguardian.com/ .…
📩✍️ We've co-signed an open letter to the Prime Minister highlighting our concern that the Online Safety Bill poses a threat to end-to-end encryption You can read the letter here 👇 https://www.globalencryption.org/ ...
This risks ❌ Creating an encryption ‘backdoor’ for criminals and hostile foreign actors ❌ Undermining the credibility of the UK on the international stage ❌ Undermining the growth and competitiveness of the UK technology sector
📝We've signed a letter alongside 70 organisations, opposing the plans in the Bill to scan our private messages en masse. READ⤵️ https://www.globalencryption.org/ ... https://twitter.com/...
👎 The Online Safety Bill will undermine encryption by empowering Ofcom to demand service providers use ‘accredited technology’ to give them access to encrypted content ❗️But encryption can't be maintained while another party not participating in the exchange has access
The #OnlineSafetyBill is a serious threat to privacy and free speech. Call on your MP to act against this censor's charter now. 📨Use our quick & simple tool⤵️ https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/ ...