Twitter has become the latest platform to ban AI-generated fake porn, otherwise known as “deepfakes.” As first reported by Motherboard and confirmed to The Verge, the company will suspend any account sharing the content, which uses machine learning algorithms to swap the faces of celebrities onto porn stars.
A spokesperson for the company told The Verge by email: “We will suspend any account we identify as the original poster of intimate media that has been produced or distributed without the subject’s consent. We will also suspend any account dedicated to posting this type of content.”
Unlike other major social media platforms, Twitter is relatively porn-friendly. Accounts can share adult photos, GIFs, and videos, as long as they’re marked with the label “sensitive content,” which users can toggle on and off to view by default. However, the company says face-swapped porn is banned under existing rules, which forbid the sharing of any “intimate media that has been produced or distributed without the subject’s consent.” Given that deepfakes are created without the permission of the porn actor in the source clip or the celebrity whose likeness is borrowed, this content definitely falls foul of these rules.
One account sharing these clips, @mydeepfakes, has already been suspended, although given Twitter’s poor record for cleaning up abuse and violent threats on its platform, it remains to be seen how effective this crack-down will be.
Twitter is only the latest platform to rule against face-swapped fake porn. PornHub and video-hosting site Gfycat have also banned the content, although there remains a large and active community of “deepfakers” on Reddit where the clips are shared after being hosted on other sites.
For individuals whose likenesses appear in these videos without their consent, enlisting the help of gatekeepers like Twitter will be the best way to stop this content from spreading. Legal experts say it’s not clear whether face-swapped porn violates any law, as the content is not defamatory (if identified as fake) and cannot be classified as revenge porn (as the pornographic element was made consensually). Individual sites that find this content distasteful will have to police themselves.