Cyber flashing became illegal in 2024. Now, the government is making it a priority offence, putting the pressure on tech companies to do something about it.
Cyber flashing is when someone sends a non-consensual explicit picture – best known as a “dick pic”.
It’s most often women on the receiving end and, according to research by dating app Bumble, the adults most likely to receive those images are women between 40 and 45 years old.
That being said, it’s an extremely common experience online, with one in three teenage girls saying they’ve received an unwanted sexual image, according to YouGov data.
What changes now?
Under the Online Safety Act, which began being fully enforced in July last year, online platforms have to make sure they’re not hosting illegal content.
If they are, they can be fined 10% of their revenue by Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, or £18m, whichever is higher.
By making cyber flashing a priority offence, the government is signalling to the regulator and tech firms that it takes this crime particularly seriously.
“The bar is much higher on what platforms need to do,” said Kanishka Narayan, the minister for AI and online safety, to Sky News.
Platforms like dating and social media apps will now need to do three things:
🞗 Assess the risk of cyber flashing specifically
🞗 Proactively take steps to prevent it, rather than reacting after it’s happened
🞗 Build safety features against cyber flashing into the design of their products
Can tech firms actually stop cyber flashing?
Cyber flashing isn’t particularly hard to stop, from a technology point of view.
Bumble has been filtering lewd messages since 2019 and open-sourced the technology four years ago.
“We trained it on a lot of data sets of both lewd, non-lewd images and that’s how we’ve been able to achieve a model with about 98% accuracy,” said Namrata Haribal, product manager for safety at Bumble.
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Almost all major platforms now have some sort of technology like this in place, designed to spot explicit images and intervene before they’re seen by someone who doesn’t want to see it.
Mr Narayan insists the upgrading of cyber flashing to a priority offence is crucial, though.
“Whilst there’s been a drop in cyber flashing as a result of it already being an offence under the Online Safety Act, by making it a priority offence, we want to stamp it out even further,” he said.
“Because we also heard that despite the drop, there are still too many instances of women and girls in particular experiencing this.”
Will cyber flashing becoming a priority offence make a difference?
The minister says yes, but Professor Clare McGlynn, professor of law at Durham University, isn’t so sure. She’s been campaigning for better cyber flashing rules for years.
“This is a very welcome first step,” said Prof McGlynn to Sky News.
“But the most significant aspect is, Is it going to be enforced? That comes down to the regulator Ofcom.”
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Rape pornography and non-consensual intimate imagery are also both priority offences, and yet both types of image abuse can still be found online, says Prof McGlynn.
“That’s because the Online Safety Act and Ofcom have just not enforced it properly.”
