This post was originally written by Hannah Cairns in August 2023. As the court case has now concluded we are finally able to publish it.
A deepfake is an image or a video where someone has been digitally edited using tools like Photoshop or AI technology to look like they are someone else or doing something they haven’t actually done. As technology advances, especially AI, deepfakes are being seen more frequently and are getting easier to make. You can now find TikTok pages of ‘celebrities’ but it’s not actually them – someone has digitally altered their face to look like whoever they want and of course, some people are taking advantage of this.
Celebrities and Twitch Streamers have recently opened up the conversation about deepfakes especially after deepfake pornography has been made of them. Can you imagine a pornographic video being shared online of someone, with your face, doing sexual acts you have not done? It would be enough to make your stomach turn. Just because celebrities and online personalities are in the public eye does not give members of the public the right to create something of this nature without the other persons consent. It almost feels like digital identity theft.
But it must just be celebrities right? Wrong. Early in 2021 I got a message from a girl, not really a friend at the time, but the type of girl who went to the same council house parties as you as a teenager where you were dressed to the nines with a bottle of Lambrini in hand. I noticed the notification on Twitter quite late at night as I was spending the night with my boyfriend at the time. The message read something along the lines of
“Hey, I’m so sorry to tell you this but my number was posted on this website a while ago and I’ve just came across pictures of you on here… *link*”
My heart dropped. As I opened the link I found it took me to a website with the most barbaric name. It was like a forum where sexual predators gather to share their findings and sick creations. The profile, who went by a pseudonym, had indeed posted pictures of me. My stomach turned as I spend the next 15-20 minutes looking through all these edited images of myself. The culprit had taken selfies and pictures of me from nights out with friends and made it look like I had semen on my face, that I was engaging in sexual acts, edited my face onto naked bodies, the list is endless. I counted over 50 images like this of me alone and the posting had been going on since around 2018. There were other local girls on there too, all posted by the same profile, all disgusting and degrading. The comments were almost worse than the images in my opinion. ‘She looks like a right slut, ‘she wants it’ ‘rapemeat’. The whole website was a breeding ground for predators and it made me feel sick. I couldn’t help but notice all of the images were of girls and women and all of the users were male. Looking around on the website I found images of innocent teachers in classrooms where men would comment vile things, images of girls who definitely looked underage posted with the headline “my friends two daughters what do you think.” That night when I first discovered the website I started panicking, of course. My partner at the time told me not to worry, that it would just be some perv I went to high school with who had a crush on me. To not even have the understanding of how I might have felt in that moment was diminishing – as if this is the price you pay for being a woman online.
Myself and the girls who had been posted on the website created a groupchat where we tried to find the common denominator to find out who the culprit was. I assumed this would be someone who had a vendetta against me, an ex? We whittled it down to two prime suspects. A couple of days into our investigation and we got our confession in the form of a pathetic attempt of an apology through Instagram messages. The criminal? One of my boyfriends best friends. A guy I had hung out with many times and would’ve said we got along quite well. We had never dated, never been in an argument, no beef. The girls and I decided this meek “I need therapy” excuse wasn’t going to cut it, so we called the police.
To my horror, when I first called the police and got through to a young male police officer he told me more or less “that sucks but it’s not illegal what can we do?” I must have called the police three times and had to explain all three times the same story over and over. They told me the website was Russian so there was nothing they could do to take the website down- useless. Eventually, a female police officer took matters into her own hands and asked me to come down to the station for an interview. Explaining to someone how demeaning and frightening this all felt was tough. I live in a small town where everyone knows one another and I couldn’t help thinking what if they were laughing at me? What if they thought the images were real? (99% of the images looked like they were edited on a Nokia and anyone with an online comfortability would’ve been able to tell they weren’t real, but that’s not the point). I had posted these images of myself online to share with my friends, what I hadn’t done was consented to these images being taken and distorted for someone else’s sexual gratification. I felt dirty and embarrassed and I hadn’t even done anything wrong. The next couple of weeks were met with anxiety in public whenever a man would look at me, had he seen the photos? I reversed searched some images of myself to see if they had been posted elsewhere and one image in particular was now on thousands of websites. It cannot even begin to explain how crushing that felt.
Over two years later and the case is still on going. The last I heard the police were charging him with Breach of the Peace and perhaps domestic charges as he had been in relationships with some of the other girls however he still lives a normal life, with his girlfriend who decided to stick by him, job and all. Nothing on his record to suggest he is a danger to women.
As technology advances, we must advance our laws. We all know the damage revenge porn can have on a victim and deepfakes are in the same category. Any rational person would agree that this is wrong and something needs to change in order to protect our young and innocent women from experiencing this. Girls should be able to post pictures on their own social media having fun and living their lives without being gruesomely sexualised online by these cowardly men behind screens. It’s our responsibility as a society to move with the times and teach our young men about the affects creating deepfakes can have and how morally wrong it is. We need to make this an illegal practice the same way we made revenge porn illegal to create a safer online space for every body.
Hannah Cairns
August 2023