The new Data (Use and Access) Act, which criminalises intimate image abuse, is a huge victory won fast in a space where progress is often glacially slow

For Jodie*, watching the conviction of her best friend, and knowing she helped secure it, felt at first like a kind of victory. It was certainly more than most survivors of deepfake image-based abuse could expect.

They had met as students and bonded over their shared love of music. In the years since graduation, he’d also become her support system, the friend she reached for each time she learned that her images and personal details had been posted online without her consent. Jodie’s pictures, along with her real name and correct bio, were used on many platforms for fake dating profiles, then adverts for sex work, then posted on to Reddit and other online forums with invitations to deepfake them into pornography. The results ended up on porn sites. All this continued for almost two years, until Jodie finally worked out who was doing it — her best friend – identified more of his victims, compiled 60 pages of evidence, and presented it to police. She had to try two police stations, having been told at the first that no crime had been committed. Ultimately he admitted to 15 charges of “sending messages that were grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing nature” and received a 20-week prison sentence, suspended for two years.

The Irish politician was targeted in 2022, in the final weeks of her run for office. She has never found out who made the malicious deepfake, but knew immediately she had to try to stop this happening to other women

When Cara Hunter, the Stormont politician, looks back on the moment she found out she had been deepfaked, she says it is “like watching a horror movie”. The setting is her grandmother’s rural home in the west of Tyrone on her 90th birthday, April 2022. “Everyone was there,” she says. “I was sitting with all my closest family members and family friends when I got a notification through Facebook Messenger.” It was from a stranger. “Is that you in the video … the one going round on WhatsApp?” he asked.

Hunter made videos all the time, especially then, less than three weeks before elections for the Northern Ireland assembly. She was defending her East Londonderry seat, campaigning, canvassing, debating. Yet, as a woman, this message from a man she didn’t know was enough to put her on alert. “I replied that I wasn’t sure which video he was talking about,” Hunter says. “So he asked, did I want to see it?” Then he sent it over.