was in a car talking with her staffers about legislation and casually scrolling through her X mentions when she saw the photo. It was the end of February, and after spending most of the week in D.C., she was looking forward to flying down to Orlando to see her mom after a work event. But everything left her mind once she saw the picture: a digitally altered image of someone forcing her to put her mouth on their genitals.
Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most visible politicians in the country right now — and she’s a young Latina woman up for reelection in 2024, which means she’s on the front lines of a disturbing, unpredictable era of being a public figure. An overwhelming 96 percent of deepfake videos are nonconsensual porn, all of which feature women, according to a recent study by the cybersecurity company DeepTrace Labs.
She’s at her most energized in these moments of our conversation, when she’s emphasizing how pervasive this problem is going to be, for so many people. She doesn’t sound like a rehearsed politician spouting out sound bites. She sounds genuinely concerned — distressed, even — about how this technology will impact humanity.Kent Nishimura/”Los Angeles Times”/Getty Images
Here in the U.S., Rep. Yvette Clarke has tried for years to get Congress to act. In 2017, she began to notice how often Black women were harassed on social media, whether they were the targets of racist remarks or offensive, manipulated images. On the internet, bigotry is often more overt, where trolls feel safe hiding behind their screens.
In May 2023, Rep. Joe Morelle introduced the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, which would have criminalized the sharing of nonconsensual and sexually explicit deepfakes. Like previous deepfake legislation, it didn’t pick up steam. Clarke says she thinks it’s taken a while for Congress to understand just how serious and pervasive of an issue this is.
In May 2020, Taylor had just graduated college and was quarantining with her boyfriend in New England when she received an odd email, with the subject line: “Fake account in your name.” A former classmate of hers had written the email, which started out, “Look, this is a really weird email to write, but I thought you would want to know.”
“It was surreal seeing my face … especially the eyes,” she tells me during a zoom call. “They looked kind of dead inside … like the deepfake looked realistic but it doesn’t quite look like — it looks like me if I was spacing out.”
Source: Tech Daily Report (techdailyreport.net)
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