Mr. Deepfakes is no longer a threat.
In good news, non-consensual deepfake porn site Mr. Deepfakes has closed down, 404 Media reports. This was because the website lost one of its service providers.
"A key service provider has permanently withdrawn its services. We cannot continue our operations due to data loss," reads a notice on the site. "Our services are not going to return in any way, so please don’t believe any website that says otherwise. This domain is going to expire and we are not going to control or maintain any future use of it. This message will be taken down in about a week."
With other platforms cracking down on non-consensual deepfake porn, though, Mr. Deepfakes became a safe haven for this kind of content. Users uploaded videos and were able to commission their own deepfakes. It was also a breeding ground for sharing techniques, methods, and datasets. All of this was done in the name of creating non-consensual media that looked creepily similar (or sometimes identical) to real people.
Mr. Deepfakes' creator remains technically anonymous, but German newspaper Der Spiegel is said to have tracked down one of the people involved—a 36-year-old man in Toronto.
Criminalization of deepfakes has already begun in some countries. Last week, the US Congress passed a bill making it illegal to create, possess or distribute deepfakes for pornographic purposes. The main EU legal framework currently in place to prevent the creation or sharing of deepfakes is the e-Commerce Directive, which requires platforms to act against illegal content. However, there is currently no specific EU law that criminalizes deepfakes.
