The UK government says it plans to make the sharing of non-consensual pornographic deepfakes illegal, with offenders facing “potential time behind bars.”The new offense is set to be added to the long-awaited and controversial Online Safety Bill, a mammoth piece of legislation that will rewrite the UK’s rules for policing harmful internet content.The government announced this morning that deepfakes would be covered in the legislation along with strengthened laws against “downblousing” (taking explicit images down a women’s top without consent).The passage of the bill was delayed this year by recent political chaos, but the UK government now plans to return it to parliament in December for further debate.1 in 14 adults in England and Wales have been threatened with sharing intimate imagesIn the government’s announcement, it says that non-consensual deepfakes will be tackled as part of a wider initiative to stamp out revenge porn and other forms of “intimate image abuse.” It defines problematic deepfakes as “manufactured intimate images” shared without consent, but does not offer further definitions of the technology involved.Regarding the UK’s plans to tackle this threat, Professor Penney Lewis of the Law Commission (an independent body designed to review the laws of England and Wales) said she was pleased about the government’s planned changes."