Research test shows that legal pressure is key to removing non-consensual nudity online

Online platforms often fail to act on reports of non-consensual intimate images submitted through safety or abuse systems—but remove the same material far more quickly when it is framed as a copyright violation, according to new University of Michigan research. The findings are published on the arXiv preprint server, and will be published at the 29th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing in October 2026.