Can Swifties be the force that finally stops deepfake porn?
Sexually explicit photographs of Taylor Swift are all over the internet. Except they are not actually pictures of Swift: they are deepfakes created with AI technology. Still, the fact they are computer generated doesn’t mean the photos don’t look horrifyingly realistic – and it certainly hasn’t stopped people from gawking at them. One of the images shared by a user on X (Twitter) was viewed more than 45m times in the 17 hours before it was taken down.
If this story sounds familiar it’s because you’ve probably heard a variation of it before. Deepfake pornography is everywhere – according to Danielle Citron, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, there are over more than 9,500 sites “devoted to non-consensual intimate imagery”. It used to take hundreds of images of someone and an immense amount of computer processing power to create a convincing deepfake. Now you just need a couple of a photos of someone’s face and a phone app. While Swift may be one of the most recent, and most high-profile, victims of the technology, it has upended an enormous number of lives.
More specifically, it’s upended the lives of girls and women. While men aren’t immune to being victims of other forms of AI-generated imagery, deepfake porn overwhelmingly targets women. A 2019 report by cybersecurity company Deeptrace labs, for example, found that non-consensual deepfake pornography accounted for 96% of the total deepfake videos online and concluded that the phenomenon “exclusively targets and harms women”. In the years since the Deeptrace report came out that harm has only increased. There has also been an uptick in cases involving deepfakes of minors. Last year, for example, boys at a New Jersey high school created and shared sexually explicit AI-generated imagery of more than 30 teenage girls.
Deepfake porn, it can’t be stressed enough, isn’t meant to titillate – it’s often meant to humiliate. Being a woman with any sort of public platform means dealing with harassment online: deepfake porn is yet another tool that troll armies and misogynists are weaponizing to punish women who behave in ways they don’t like. It’s meant to shut women up, to drive them offline. When high-profile figures like Swift are targeted with deepfake porn, it sends a message to young girls: put your head above the parapet and you will be punished for it. It doesn’t matter how successful you are, how many billions you have in the bank, the world will still find a way to objectify and humiliate you.
Girls, by the way, are hearing this message loud and clear. A 2022 study in the UK found that girls aged nine-to-18 ranked “being a leader” the lowest priority in a list of 17 attributes for future work. Why would they want to be leaders, why would they want to be in the public eye, when they see what sort of abuse those women receive?
Swift, for her part, hasn’t released an official statement about the fake nude images that have been circulating, but, according to the Daily Mail, she is furious about the pictures and is considering taking legal action. Swift’s devoted fans are also furious and they have been taking more immediate action. Swift fans mass-reported accounts sharing the deepfakes and also posted thousands of images tagged with phrases like “Taylor Swift AI” to make the deepfakes hard to find.
If there is a silver lining to this sordid situation it is this: angry Swifties are a force to be reckoned with. If anyone can get the government to take deepfake porn seriously, if anyone can get social media platforms to pay attention, it is Swift’s enormous and extremely motivated fan base. Let’s not forget the Great Ticketmaster Fiasco of 2022, shall we? After Ticketmaster made a mess of presale tickets for Swift’s Eras Tour, lawmakers in the US started making a lot of noise about anti-competitive practices in the music industry. Swift’s fans managed to make antitrust law a mainstream talking point. Now their collective anger may help spur changes to federal law when it comes to deepfake porn.
And that change can’t come soon enough. While some individual US states have passed laws aimed at curtailing the sharing of deepfake porn without consent, there is no federal law which criminalizes the creation or sharing of fake pornographic images. Victims have very little recourse. And as lawmakers drag their feet, use of this technology is growing rapidly. While the imagery may be fake, the harm it is causing is very, very real.
There have been more than 64,000 rape-caused pregnancies in US states with abortion bans since 2022
That horrifying figure is from a research letter published in Jama Internal Medicine. “Sexual assault is incredibly common – I knew that in a general sense,” one of the researchers told NPR. “But to be confronted with these estimates that are so high in states where there’s no meaningful abortion access? It’s hard to comprehend.”
US women who miscarry are in dangerous legal limbo post-Roe
Abortion is now essentially banned in 14 US states – and the laws on miscarriages are dangerously vague. The Guardian looks at the human cost of this “murky legal landscape”.
Anti-abortion Republican compares women to livestock
During a debate about a potential 14-week abortion ban, Wisconsin state representative Joel Kitchens told his colleagues he’s basically an expert on abortion because … he’s a vet. “You know, in my veterinary career, I did thousands of ultrasounds on animals, you know, determining pregnancy and that kind of thing,” Kitchens said. “So I think I know mammalian fetal development better than probably anyone here.”
There has been a 300% increase in the miscarriage rate in Gaza
Healthcare workers report a giant increase in the miscarriage rate since Israel’s relentless bombing campaign began three months ago, Nour Beydoun, Care’s regional adviser on protection and gender in emergencies, told Jezebel. Funnily enough the pro-life crowd in the US is cheering this on.
Hillary Clinton has had Kenough
As you have probably heard (9m thinkpieces have been written on the issue), Barbie’s director, Greta Gerwig, and star, Margot Robbie, were not nominated for Oscars while Ryan Gosling was. Clinton addressed this incredibly tragic state of affairs with the world’s cringiest tweet.
Lily Gladstone has become the first Native American to be nominated for an Oscar for best actress
Gladstone’s historic nomination is a result of her role in Killers of the Flower Moon.
Swimming in cold water can significantly reduce menopause symptoms
While the evidence is anecdotal, researchers said cold water swimming “can be used by women to alleviate physical symptoms, such as hot flushes, aches and pains”.
The week in pawtriarchy
Valentine’s Day is coming up and, if you’re not in a particularly loving mood, a Rhode Island animal charity is running the promotion for you. For a $5 donation, the charity will write the name of your ex (or something/someone you loathe) on a paper heart and put it in the shelter’s kitty litter to be pooped on. It seems like a lot of people are looking for “retripootion” because the promotion has already proved very popular indeed.
