The Real Deal: Laws Against Sexual Deepfakes Spread Across the US
48 States and counting now make it illegal to alter images or videos illicitly
Giving it to you straight, cross my heart, totally coming clean, but as of September 2025, with Michigan joining, nearly every US state has passed some form of legislation outlawing the production or distribution of nonconsensually digitally manipulated media, i.e. deepfakes.
“These videos can ruin someone’s reputation, career, and personal life. As such, these bills prohibit the creation of deep fakes that depict individuals in sexual situations and create sentencing guidelines for the crime,” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) press release stated.
Sponsored by State Representatives Bierlein (R) and Tsernoglou (D), House Bills 4047 and 4048 mandate creators as well as disseminators of deepfakes that “would cause physical, emotional, reputational, or economic harm to an individual falsely depicted” be imprisoned for no more than a year and/or a $3,000 USD fine.
But the potential repercussions don’t stop there. For instance, if the person who created the deepfake did so to for monetary gain, uploaded it to their own or any other site, was previously convicted of any other crime, or if the deepfake was made to “harass, extort, threaten, or cause physical, emotional, reputational, or economic harm to the depicted individual” what was previously a misdemeanor automatically becomes a substantial felony.
Book ‘em, Danno
Though the Michigan bills were drafted to make individual deepfake instigators responsible for their actions and don’t target the online platforms involved, the federal Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Network (TAKE IT DOWN) act does.
In May this year, Ted Cruz (R) introduced this legislation that sets what many critics claim is an unrealistically tight deadline for platforms to identify and remove nonconsensually digitally altered content.
RECOMMENDED READ: Uncool at Any Speed: Deepfakes Are Emotionally Harmful and Environmentally Wasteful
TAKE IT DOWN has also been lambasted as too-far-reaching. Alarming enough, but potentially more so in light of the current US administration’s propensity for retribution towards any perceived opponents, which could easily turn it into an anti-free-speech weapon.
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote about it back before it was signed into law:
The takedown provision applies to a much broader category of content—potentially any images involving intimate or sexual content—than the narrower NCII definitions found elsewhere in the bill. The takedown provision also lacks critical safeguards against frivolous or bad-faith takedown requests. Lawful content—including satire, journalism, and political speech—could be wrongly censored.
These are their stories
Sex-related deepfakes cause devastating social, financial, and emotional harm, yet state and federal laws to ban them haven’t considered how difficult it can be to tell the difference between what is real and what is not.
In addition to technical challenges platforms must also be willing to put themselves on the line when it comes to spotting illicit content.
As Kate Ruane, the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project director, told 404Media, “If you do not have perfect technology to identify whatever it is we’re calling a deepfake, you are going to get a lot of guessing being done by the social media companies, and you’re going to get disproportionate amounts of censorship.”
Further adding, social media companies may instead prefer just to ban everything that might be a deepfake instead of running afoul of laws like TAKE IT DOWN: “For a social media company, it is not rational for them to open themselves up to that risk, right? It’s simply not. And so my concern is that any video with any amount of editing, which is like every single TikTok video, is then banned for distribution on those social media sites.”
To protect the innocent
As we’ve written before, though it’s critically important to do whatever’s necessary to prevent the creation and propagation of sexually-assaultive deepfakes, we need to ensure these laws do what they are intended to do and don’t end up making an already dire situation far worse.
A great place to begin is to ensure lawmakers understand how technologies like deepfakes actually work and, from there, take the expert advice on what can, can’t, and should never, ever be done to stop the spread of deepfakes, while at the same time protecting the civil liberties of others.
Image Sources: Depositphotos
