Initially my idea came from a personal place , as a young women growing up in an age of social media , there has been (unfortunately) more than one occasion where young girls and boys I knew, sometimes even underage, would have had nude photographs leaked of them.
However as always the internet is constantly evolving and within the last few years a new type of revenge porn came to my attention, AI generated porn or 'Deepfakes' are the newest threat to young women and men.
When I discovered that now images and videos can now be artificially doctored to create fake nude footage of anyone it terrified me that now anyone could be humiliated with no real control over it ,and when I read a study about the volume of Deepfake porn footage online I wanted to investigate further.
As a very young teenager initially, no laws were covering the phenomenon that we now call 'revenge porn', but laws had to come into play when photographs and the internet were just a click away. After weeks of making interview requests, it seemed that it was harder than it initially seemed to find women or men who wanted to talk about the deepfake issue. Partially because although revenge porn has been around for years, this new type of image-based abuse uses new technology therefore a lot of the people who have been affected by it may only just be coming to terms with it, or may not wish to speak about it in fear of being targeted again.
England and Wales introduced a law in 2015 that makes it an offence to send intimate images without consent, both online and in the form of printed pictures, with a maximum sentence of two years in prison. By the time this law was passed I was 17 years old and many young women and men I knew had already been affected by revenge porn before it was illegal so I was happy to see a law be put into place in an attempt to stop this.
Rather than just focusing on the law in the UK, I started looking for victims of deepfake image abuse from anywhere in the world. I have chosen now to focus my project on speaking about victims experiences and finding out what support is there for them in the UK based victims,and looking at how this advanced technology can be taken and manipulated when in the wrong hands.