The biggest pop star in the world is living a nightmare that many women know. For days now, the internet has been flooded with fake images showing Taylor Swift in pornographic poses. On Platform X, once known as Twitter, some of these posts have been seen tens of millions of times and shared tens of thousands of times.
X’s policies prohibit”synthetic, manipulated or taken out of context media” as well as intimate or sexually explicit photosthat were recorded or distributed without the consent of the person depicted. Nevertheless, the platform responded very late. It was only after 17 hours that a post that had already been viewed 47 million times was deleted. The images can still be found on X with little effort.
You could consider it the umpteenth piece of evidence that X is failing at content moderation. But in this case it’s about more than the consequences of the radical austerity measures that Elon Musk has been implementing since he took over the company at the end of 2022. On
Misogynistic groups on Telegram
Fake photos and videos of almost every prominent singer or actress are circulating that supposedly show them naked or having sex. In the past, manipulation was clumsy with Photoshop, but modern technology has professionalized this form of abuse and made it suitable for the masses. On the one hand, there are so-called deepfakes, which insert the face of another person into a real photo or video. On the other hand, so-called generative AI has recently made it possible to generate completely artificial content without any technical knowledge.
This seems to be how Swift’s pornographic fakes came about. A research by 404 Media According to them they were created with Microsoft Designer. The freely accessible, free software creates images from text. According to this, the fakes came from a group on the messenger Telegram, and it was only a day later that they were shared on X and distributed en masse.
Microsoft has responded by blocking certain terms, but instructions are being shared on Telegram on how these blocks can supposedly be circumvented. The basic problem doesn’t change much anyway: there are hundreds of comparable image generators, and not all operators of these programs care about what they are used for. On the contrary: Some providers advertise that their technology can be used to create fake nude photos.
Almost all deepfakes are pornographic
The public discussion about the dangers of deepfakes and generative AI mostly revolves around political disinformation and propaganda as well as fraud. The technology has been misused as a weapon against women to a much greater extent for years. There was that in 2017 first reports of AI pornography, even back then Taylor Swift was one of the celebrities affected. Two years later, a study concluded that sexually explicit fakes 96 percent of all deepfake videos made up.
Now almost anyone can create fake nude photos. It recently became known that teenagers at a high school in New Jersey had shared deepfakes of their classmates. “What annoys me most is that it’s 100 percent something that was ‘predicted’ years in advance,” writes Stanford researcher Renee DiResta on the platform threads about the misuse of Swift. Experts have been warning about AI-supported harassment and revenge pornography for years. “It’s another example of technology moving quickly while lawmakers lag behind.”
At least the current case shows that there is another group on the Internet that is more powerful than misogynistic men: Swifties, as the singer’s fans call themselves. With tens of thousands of harmless postings under the keyword “Protect Taylor Swift” they are trying to push the fakes out of the search results. This doesn’t work completely, but at least partially. Anyone who searches for “Taylor Swift” will primarily see posts from her supporters.
Maybe the attention to the topic even has something good. If you believe the British tabloid Daily Mail, then Swift should be angry and consider legal consequences. It wouldn’t be the first time that it takes a prominent victim for politicians to pass stricter laws that ultimately benefit all women.