Even Taylor Swift is Victim of Deep Fake Porn

The difference of course, is that when Taylor’s attorneys call, even Elon Musk takes the call. While no one should be victimized by deep fake porn, Swift has resources to call on that virtually no one else does, so this is only important if it calls attention to the problem.

The people most at risk are teenagers and marginalized people, who are really already on shaky ground and have virtually no resources to fight back.

On January 24th, sexually explicit AI generate images of Taylor Swift flooded Twitter. Swifties, Taylor Swift’s fans, banded together to protest the images.

One image was viewed 47 million times before the user was suspended by Twitter. It is likely that the images were downloaded and reshared. As a result, actually removing them is impossible.

Searches for Swift’s name on Twitter just before the NFL playoffs returned the error message “something went wrong, Try reloading.” Twitter’s head of business operations said “this is a temporary action and done with an abundance of caution as we prioritize this safety issue”. Another interpretation of this statement might be “we heard from Taylor’s lawyers and since she has more money than we do, the abundance of caution is to try to avoid being sued into a pile of dust”. Don’t know if that happened, but it would not surprise me.

Now consider that you are a teenager with image anxiety and someone does this to you. Now what? Basically, there is nothing that you can do.

In 2023, there were 280,000 non-consensual exploitative videos according to one report. This is an exceptionally low estimate of reality. The duration of these videos was 1249 days and the views exceeded 4 billion.

For many victims, the effects of these videos include depression, thoughts of suicide, PTSD, and other problems.

If you know someone who is a victim of this, you can support them. Encourage them to get help if it is affecting them and report it to the police. While reporting it will have little short term effect, it may help the police to get more resources.

Most importantly, victims need to know that they should not feel shame or guilt; this is not their fault.

Credit: Cybernews and The Guardian

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