Deepfakes: Should we be concerned about this terrifying new form of cyber abuse?

Deepfake images and videos are becoming all the more common online.

Think of them as a bigger and badder version of Photoshop – altering images is nothing new, but deepfakes are super convincing and almost impossible to distinguish from reality.

Many of us will have seen the viral fake videos of Obama or Mark Zuckerburg doing the rounds – there’s even a TikTok account dedicated solely to deepfakes of Tom Cruise.

Deepfake technology is becoming accessible to everyone, and unfortunately, it’s now being almost exclusively for one thing – pornography.

The vast majority of deepfake content on the internet is sexually explicit images of women.

Actress Bella Thorne is just one of the many female celebrities who has fallen victim to this terrifying form of cyber abuse.

A video Thorne posted on Instagram of herself crying when her father passed away was sickeningly used to superimpose her face onto another woman’s body and create a deepfake of her masturbating.

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