Deepfake porn: a bizarre backstory

Karl D. Stephan

September 25, 2024 3 Reactions

From time to time, Mercator picks up one of my posts and republishes it, with my permission. That happened with last week's blog, and readers of Mercator began commenting on it. I get copies of these comments, and one of them said the following about the sentence saying that the Republican party of Virginia mailed out sexual images of her made without her consent: "This is a false statement. Gibson took and streamed the videos herself while soliciting viewers for money. Deep fake porn is terrible, but it has nothing to do with the Gibson porn videos."

Another comment right after that says this: "According to Wikipedia: In September 2023, a Republican operative provided The Washington Post with videos showing Gibson performing sex acts with her husband on the adult streaming site . . ." and it goes on to name the site.

The Wikipedia article on Susanna Gibson referred to a Washington Post article of Sept. 11, 2023. Now, one can question this story, but I have only so much space and we're going to stop at this point and see what the Post says. According to that news source, Gibson and her husband recorded video of themselves doing certain things, and offering to do certain other things if viewers would send them monetary tokens, on a website called. . . well, let's leave that out, shall we? Suffice it to say that members of that website are privileged to view videos that other members like the Gibsons post, but even that website's own rules forbid its users to ask other users to exchange money for seeing certain things.

So according to the Post, as many as 5,000 people could have been watching the Gibsons doing things that former ages regarded as suitable only for the total privacy of one's bedroom. And Susanna Gibson was apparently okay with that, especially if she raised money for her campaign, or next week's groceries, or whatever her motivation was.

What got Ms. Gibson upset was not the fact that 5,000 strangers had a fly's-eye view of their bedroom, but that somebody copied and posted these videos onto non-subscription publicly available sites, and some Republican sent a note to the Washington Post telling the paper where the videos could be found. And they found them, and published an article about them while Gibson was still running for office. That's when she got mad and lawyered up and accused the paper of "an illegal invasion of my privacy designed to humiliate me and my family."

So where does the truth lie? I don't think the Washington Postmade up the details they published, which have the ring of authenticity. And I suppose there are people around whose moral formation is so twisted that they think making money from porn seen by 5,000 total strangers is fine, but when news of doing this gets around in a way that interferes with your election campaign, you're suddenly a victim of invasion of privacy. Was there even any mailing of any deepfake porn? Only according to Gibson.

There's enough mud in this story that nobody involved comes out quite clean. IEEE Spectrum could have tried checking Gibson's story, for one thing, instead of just taking her word for it. I could have checked around myself, but it was just a small part of a larger article, and I didn't. And one can ask whether sites like the one that Gibson was using to get egg money should even exist, although as one of the lawyers involved pointed out, everybody on that site is a consenting adult and as long as they're okay with the rules and what people do on it, apparently nobody can stop them.

None of this affects the main point of last week's blog, which is that deepfake porn is a terrible thing and something ought to be done about it. But this weird little side story shows that deepfake porn is the tip of an iceberg of behaviors that technologies associated with the Internet have encouraged, not all of which are illegal or generally regarded as immoral, but which certainly couldn't be done as easily or as extensively as they are now with technological help.

A professor I knew years ago once told me, "Never write anything you don't want to show up on the front page of the New York Times," and updated to today by including "write or video," I still think that's good advice. Gibson now knows this to her regret, and this is the last blog I'm going to do on deepfake porn for a while.  

Does this strange story say anything about the state of American politics in 2024?  

Karl D. Stephan is a professor of electrical engineering at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. His ebook Ethical and Otherwise: Engineering in the Headlines is available in Kindle format and also in the iTunes store.

This article has been republished, with permission, from his blog Engineering Ethics.

Image credit: Susanna Gibson election website