Despite the high volume of complaints and removals, the biggest deepfake video website alone has received takedown requests for 12,600 URLs, 88% of which have been taken offline. Critics argue that tech companies should be examining why these sites are still in search results. The rise of deepfake content online has been met with slow action from tech companies and lawmakers, even as machine learning improvements have made it easier to create deepfakes. The DMCA has been an important tool for victims to get their content removed, but it is an imperfect tool when it comes to deepfakes.
Key takeaways:
- The number of nonconsensual deepfake porn videos online has significantly increased since 2017, with thousands of women, including content creators, complaining to Google and requesting the removal of such content from search results.
- More than 13,000 copyright complaints have been made to Google concerning content on a dozen of the most popular deepfake websites, resulting in thousands of nonconsensual videos being removed from the web.
- Despite the high volume of copyright complaints and removals, critics argue that Google should take more action against the specific websites, including removing them from search results entirely.
- The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is an important tool for victims of image-based sexual abuse to get their content removed from the internet, but it is an imperfect tool when it comes to deepfakes, as the process of creating a deepfake can transform the image so much that the resulting image is not the same intellectual property as the images it was sourced from.