A private members' bill asks for a change to voyeurism legislation to stop videos being posted online for profit.

Covertly filming women on nights out to upload the videos to social media should be made illegal, the Liberal Democrats have said.

The party has put forward a private members’ bill calling on the government to update voyeurism legislation to prevent the content from being posted online for profit.

It said the bill would clamp down on what it calls “a covert filming epidemic” and wants the government to force social media platforms to remove such content and permanently ban repeat offenders.

It comes after a BBC investigation exposed dozens of accounts on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. The videos focused almost entirely on women, filmed without their knowledge and taken from low angles or behind, sometimes revealing intimate body parts.

The government said covert filming of women and girls was “vile” and vowed to stop people profiting from it.

The BBC investigation identified nearly 50 women who had been filmed without their knowledge.

  • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    11·
    13 hours ago

    This law is not targeting people filming in public. No provisions in the law say that you can’t film in public.

    The entire premise of this law is based on filming in public. It doesn’t say you can’t film in public, but it does say you can’t share videos containing certain content that isn’t well defined and can easily be twisted to include any video video filmed in public. Imagine someone filming a protestor getting beaten by police where a woman is facing away somewhere in the background. This constitutes “filming an unsuspecting woman’s behind” and the video gets taken down while the uploader gets banned. This is such an easy point to reach and doesn’t involved some convoluted conspiracy to pull off.

    I never said it wouldn’t impact people uploading protests or police brutality. I never spoke to that point at all.

    Yes, you did speak to it here when responding to this person:

    But I also feel like this is the kind of law that needs to be crafted very carefully to make sure that it’s not going to infringe on legitimate reasons people may have to record people in public. I could absolutely see Republicans here twisting a law like this that was made with good intentions to go after people for posting videos of ice arrests online.

    This doesn’t appear to be a crackdown on filming in public places. It seems to be going after the people who distribute it and the platforms who host it.