The naked truth about press coverage of Keir Starmer's nude ban plan
The Prime Minister's latest "won't somebody please think of the children" policy is treated seriously by a media addicted to easy solutions to complicated problems.
Previously: Trading dog whistles for klaxons
Researching this edition of the newsletter was fraught with danger. What might my search history end up looking like after pursuing queries that included the phrase “Keir Starmer nude”? What terrifyingly niche ads might the internet’s marketers believe I am now interested in seeing?
It’s easy to laugh about the Prime Minister’s demand that tech companies implement systems to prevent children from being able to see, create, or send nude images within three months or face legislation to force them to make the change. But what on a surface level looks like a common sense child protection move is fraught with unintended consequences, technical challenges, and the potential for huge state overreach and an expansion of surveillance culture.
In a speech at London Tech Week yesterday, Starmer said:
I am calling on tech companies operating in this country to introduce device controls that prevent children from sending and receiving sexually explicit images. This is not an impossible challenge. These are some of the most innovative companies in the world and I believe they can solve it, but if they choose not to, then we will act.
The Sun — which, for decades, exposed children to nude images on page 3, concealed behind the flimsiest of thin paper paywalls — greeted the news with the tabloid’s most natural expression of glee, shouty capital letters:
TECH CRACKDOWN Children will be BLOCKED from sending & receiving explicit images on phones, Starmer says – as PM threatens new laws
Its chief political correspondent, Martina Bet, writes:
The move is designed to stop predators grooming victims online and prevent youngsters stumbling across pornography.
Adults will still be able to access explicit content, but only after going through age verification checks.
The article doesn’t talk about how the government wants firms to implement the plan, nor does it include any quotes from experts who think it won’t work or object to it on the basis of civil liberties and privacy.
Over at BBC News, tech editor Zoe Kleinman, does report on criticisms of the plan:
Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “Protecting children online is vital, but these are outrageous plans that will fail to address the underlying causes of online harm. Put simply, the Labour government is threatening ID checks for the internet. No-one in a democracy should need to show their passport just to get online.”
Likewise, Open Rights Group have spoken of their concern of the infrastructure being expanded.
“This would turn every phone into a surveillance device,” said Platform Power Programme Manager James Baker.
However, those quotes come right at the end of her story.
In The Times, The Sun’s slightly more subtle reactionary sibling, home affairs editor, Matt Dathan, opens his story like this:
Sir Keir Starmer has announced rules designed to make it impossible for children to use technology to take, share or view nude images, in a move that will also help to prevent them accessing pornography.
Again, criticisms of the policy are placed right at the end of the report, where many readers simply won’t see them.
For the Daily Mail, home affairs editor, David Barrett, managed to compose an even more tabloidtastic opening than The Sun delivered:
Tech companies will be forced to stop children viewing or sharing nude images online amid growing concern over horrific abuse by paedophiles. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said new measures would make Britain the first country in the world to block youngsters from making or viewing imagery with nude or sexual content.
Any suggestion that the plan might be unworkable or undesirable is entirely absent from the Mail’s reporting, leaving plenty of space for more scary stories and scolding that the government simply isn’t going fast enough or far enough.
Inevitably, the Daily Express, which makes the Mail look restrained, went even further:
Sick paedophile gangs are trying to convince children to commit suicide, self-harm and engage in depraved sex acts online. Perverts are taking innocent pictures or clips of children from social media accounts and using AI to convert them into abuse videos.
Did Chris Morris make Brass Eye for nothing?
Elsewhere in The Times, there’s a feature headlined How would a default ban on nude content work? which actually takes the time to ask whether the policy is actually possible and whether its a good idea. Technology correspondent, Mark Sellman, writes:
There will also be resistance from privacy advocates who are wary about any “client-side scanning” done on devices. In 2021 Apple proposed an on-device scanning system designed to detect child abuse material but had to drop the measure after criticism from campaigners and researchers concerned about creating a back door for government surveillance.
However, the only experts quoted in the piece are people with a commercial interest in pushing the policy — the executive director of the Age Verification Providers Association and the chairman of SafeToNet, the company whose nude-blocking software has been trumpeted by the government.
Over at The Guardian, its home affairs editor, Rajeev Syal, like many other reporters, quotes liberally from a government briefing on the plan:
The announcement has been driven by an explosion in child sexual abuse referrals. The UK’s National Crime Agency receives 1,700 referrals every week. Last year nine in 10 child abuse images were generated by children, many of whom had been tricked or blackmailed by abusers they had met on the internet.
Online grooming cases have risen to 7,000 a year in the UK, with organised criminal gangs and social media sites profiting from the sale and exchange of images and footage of abuse.
The story slips in one criticism of the policy, again from Big Brother Watch, right at the end, sandwiched between a quote from the former safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, and some bland corporate verbiage from Google.
It’s obvious why the idea appears to both politicians and commentators alike. It sounds like a huge and horrific problem can be solved at the flick of a switch. Why wouldn’t you get behind the idea? Surely, if you don’t, you must be on the side of the tech billionaires and the very worst of bad actors. Don’t you want to protect children?
This is yet more vibes-based policy making, the kind of thing that sounds good to focus groups because it taps into their most primal (and genuine) fears. It allows the government to say it is doing something without having to actually deal with the technical realities. At the same time, Starmer’s administration is courting tech companies at every turn, desperate to bake AI into every aspect of governance.
The big red “stop nudes” button is appealing because it’s a lot easier than investing in proper services to protect children and in the kind of education that will help them grow up in the world as it exists rather than the sterile bubble of Starmer’s imagination. Bad actors will circumvent these measures while ordinary people’s privacy is undermined, and health information and even art is censored. The design choices that have led to this environment are the same choices that the government courts when it tries to partner with these tech companies.
The media loves policies like this because they produce simple, punchy headlines and can be tied to the scariest of statistics. Saying, this is a complicated problem that needs complicated solutions is the polar opposite of what makes a truly clickable column. It’s hard to get people to hear that though when the choir is screaming, “Won’t somebody think of the children?”
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Our global rape culture is not going to be changed at all by this Big Daddy state crack down on social media sexualised abuse. The opposite. Power abusers in all walks of life and in all forms will find it both a call to more extreme actions and an enabling justification for even more forms of abuses of power. Until the underlying intentions of our late stage capitalist societies, exploitation for personal profits or infantile Big Men’s dreams of being ever bigger, are honestly exposed and addressed, no one can be safe.
Thanks Mic, as ever.
While I don't dispute your central thesis - that everyone wants a magic silver bullet to come along and solve difficult problems, and that politicians are as keen to announce them as must-publish-fast media are to want to report such claims without bothering to subject them to any real scrutiny - I'm personally feeling like there might be a little more that's heartening here than in many of the other (manifold) similar instances of policy announcements and the reporting of them.
The bit that I think is different here is that the germ of truth in the middle of what it reads like Starmer has said is that it is up to the providers of these services to provide their services in a socially, legally and morally responsible manner - and the government (at least, as far as its current leader says) intends to get serious about putting enforcement measures in place to ensure they do this. For years we've had people in these companies moaning that it's impossible to police material transmitted on them, and using that as an argument for continuing to do nothing. This is clearly rubbish: though the detailed version - it's impossible *without them spending a fair bit of money on it* - is the one that neither tech firms, politicians nor media commentators seem to want to spend any time looking at. These firms make billions of pounds/dollars/etc. and have done so over the last few decades by rampaging through existing business, social and political structures/institutions, asserting their right to "disrupt" "markets" and provide "innovation" as if they were a special case and existing laws don't, and should never be allowed to, apply to them. And, as a society, we've basically just let them. The supposed privacy implications here are a straw man: if, say, Facebook was serious about preventing certain types of "content" appearing in users' accounts, it would be able to block it at the point of distribution: nobody would have to go into your phone or your account to prevent you from seeing it. That they don't do this is not because it's impossible to achieve technically, it's because they choose not to - and they have taken that choice for profit-related reasons, not moral or social or ethical ones. If Labour are serious about calling them on their decades of pretend hand-wringing and genuinely intend to make them behave with a modicum of responsibility to the audiences their product is used by, then good luck to them.
All that said: I'm not exactly holding my breath, because doing all that will be legislatively and politically very complicated, and by no means the easy quick fix that this announcement appears to be trying to implement. In the current political moment, where Starmer may be lucky to still be in his current job for much longer and where, even if he does stay, the pressure for more "quick wins" will be impossible to resist, I can't see there being sufficient political will to push this to the point where it would need to get to if it was to become proper, useful, meaningful regulation. But as an indication of a new direction of travel, fighting back against these parasitical corporations is long overdue and more than welcome.