Advances of deepfake technology have led to a whole new dimension of revenge porn being created.
In 2019 the company Deeptrace found that 96% of the 15,000 deepfake videos it found online were pornographic, and that figure was almost double the amount it had been in 2018 which was 7,694.
The study also found that deepfake pornography is a phenomenon that exclusively targets and harms women. In contrast, the non-pornographic deepfake videos that were analyzed on YouTube contained a majority of male subjects with 61% being male and 39% being female.
In the research it was also found that eight of the top ten most popular porn sites contained deepfake videos, although almost all of them have policies against deepfake pornography.
Although in 2018 PornHub banned deepfake videos sometimes deepfakes can still be found on the site even though it aims to remove them.
The problem with this is as the technology is becoming more widely available and easier to use, very convincing deepfake porn videos can be created of anyone and it can be hard to prove that the video isn’t real.
The manipulated videos can be used to harass people like my interviewee Noelle Martin.
The majority of these videos are being made without the consent of adult performer or the person being deepfaked on to the video.