Online Safety Act 2023 Codes of Practice on Illegal Content

Non-consensual intimate image abuse can have devastating and long-lasting impacts on victims and disproportionately affects women and girls. Delivering stronger protections against this harm is a key Government priority. The Prime Minister committed earlier this year to strengthen protections for victims and ensure platforms take a more proactive role tackling this horrendous abuse.

Today marks a further important step in strengthening protections online, as I lay before Parliament an amendment to Ofcom’s codes of practice for the illegal content duties, bringing in hash matching to strengthen protections against non-consensual intimate image abuse.

The Online Safety Act 2023 puts a range of duties on social media companies and search services, making them responsible for their users’ safety on their platforms. These include duties to put in place systems and processes for tackling illegal content and activity. Ofcom, as the independent regulator for this regime, is required to set out steps in codes of practice that providers should take to ensure they fulfil these duties.

Ofcom issued its first codes of practice for the illegal content duties following parliamentary scrutiny. Those codes came into force in March 2025. They introduced a framework of measures, and required services to take a proactive, systems-based approach to tackling illegal harms.

This amendment introduces a targeted additional measure to strengthen protections against non-consensual intimate image abuse. It sets a clear legal expectation that relevant services will use perceptual hash-matching technologies, or demonstrably equivalent tools, to identify and prevent the re-uploading and circulation of known non-consensual intimate images, including intimate image deepfakes. In practice, this will require services at risk of hosting such content to deploy proactive detection systems, capable of preventing repeat uploads at scale, rather than relying on case-by-case takedown, following user reports. This approach meaningfully supports victims, and ensures that once content is identified, it is effectively prevented from reappearing.

Ofcom has now submitted an amendment to its codes of practice for the illegal content duties. I am laying this before Parliament for scrutiny. If neither House objects to the amendment, Ofcom must issue the amended codes, and the updated measures will apply from 21 calendar days after they are issued.

Once in force, these updated measures will further strengthen the existing framework, ensuring that service providers put in place effective systems and processes to prevent the spread of illegal intimate image abuse content, including through the use of proactive technologies.

The amendment represents a further step in implementing the Online Safety Act and strengthening protections for users, particularly in tackling some of the most harmful forms of online abuse against women and girls. Ofcom will continue to build on this framework and keep its codes under review to address emerging harms.