Revenge Porn Helpline gets official role in reporting intimate images
From 12 November 2026, new Home Office regulations will recognise the Revenge Porn Helpline as an official body for telling online platforms about intimate images shared without consent.
The Home Office has named the organisation that runs the Revenge Porn Helpline as an official body for telling online platforms about intimate images shared without consent. The new regulations were made on 20 October and come into force across the UK on 12 November 2026.
What is changing
The regulations name South West Grid for Learning Trust, which runs the helpline. This means the law recognises it as suitable to report intimate images shared without consent to online platforms.
The helpline can report an intimate photo or video when the person in it, or someone acting for them, says they did not agree to it being shared. Its reports are meant to help platforms decide whether sharing the image is a criminal offence.
The regulations do not place any new duties on platforms.
What it means for consumers
The Revenge Porn Helpline gives adults in the UK confidential advice and helps them report and remove intimate images shared without their consent. People under 18 can use Report Remove, run by Childline and the Internet Watch Foundation. Our guide explains how to report content to a social media platform.
Platforms must make it easy to report these images. Under online safety law, they must also have systems to take an image down within 48 hours of a report from the person in it, or someone acting for them. Those systems must also take down any other content they find that is the same or substantially the same.
A platform does not have to take an image down if it decides that sharing it is not a crime, or that the report did not come from the person in it or someone acting for them.
What happens next
Ofcom, which enforces the online safety rules, said in its October 2026 industry bulletin that it will consult on the 48-hour takedown duties by the end of 2026, with a view to bringing them into force in 2027.
According to the Home Office factsheet, Ofcom can take enforcement action against platforms that do not comply, including fines. The government is also looking at how a secure UK register of digital fingerprints of verified intimate images shared without consent could work.