Tightening Restrictions on Deepfake Porn: What US Lawmakers Could Learn from the UK

Kaylee Williams is a Ph.D. student of communications at the Columbia Journalism School. Houses of Parliament, Palace of Westiminster, London. On June 27, the UK Parliament tabled amendments to the proposed Online Safety Bill which will expand the government’s power to prosecute people for sharing nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes (NPDs), as well as “revenge porn” and other forms of image-based sexual abuse. These changes will put the UK leagues ahead of the US government—which still has no federal legal protections for victims whose images are used without their consent to generate sexually explicit materials with artificial intelligence. Expected to pass later this year, the new amendments to the Online Safety Bill will “remove the requirement for prosecutors to prove perpetrators intended to cause distress to secure a conviction,” according to the BBC.  The bill will also make sharing nonconsensual, sexually explicit material punishable by up to six months in prison. If the perpetrator is proven to have acted with intent to harm or humiliate the victim, the maximum sentence is raised to 2 years. Additionally, those convicted of the crime will be listed on a register of sex offenders. Dr. Mary Anne Franks, George Washington Law School professor and president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, described the new amendments to the bill as “far more sophisticated and comprehensive than the vast majority of US laws on image-based abuse.” In the US, only a handful of states have enacted laws which prohibit the sharing of deepfake pornography in any capacity, and…Tightening Restrictions on Deepfake Porn: What US Lawmakers Could Learn from the UK