Sexually explicit deepfakes are on the rise, proportionally affecting women. It’s gotten so bad that a bipartisan bill to combat the dissemination of the highly intrusive act passed unanimously through the Senate last week. In an attempt to combat the harmful content, Google is instituting a crackdown. Google lays out its two-pronged attack methods on the company blog to keep deepfakes from appearing in searches.
I imagine if you’ve ever been a victim of an explicit deepfake or even revenge porn, the first thing on your mind is removing the offending content. However, it’s been notoriously difficult to get something taken down. Google has updated the system to request that the content be reduced. According to Google, when the content is successfully removed, the search engine will attempt to filter out all explicit content related to the term. And Google will take down any duplicate posts.
To get an explicit post removed from Google Search, it must meet the following criteria:
- You’re identifiably depicted in the imagery.
- The imagery in question is fake and falsely depicts you nude or in a sexually explicit situation.
- The imagery was distributed without your consent.
Google’s ranking system has also undergone an update. The first step is creating a ranking that won’t surface much explicit content. The search engine will attempt to present non-explicit results, such as a news article, in the case of search queries with a high rate of inappropriate results when a name is queried. Google claims its current updates have reduced deepfake port entries by over 70% (I’d love to see the real-life numbers on that statistic).
Google acknowledges that determining whether or not the content is consensual (like an actor’s nude scene as opposed to a deepfake) is an ongoing challenge. It’s a problem that the company states, “We’re making ongoing improvements to better surface legitimate content and downrank explicit fake content.”
Finally, Google made a list and checked it twice. If you get too many flags from Google on your search results, particularly regarding removals, your site can get demoted. That means if your page has too many explicit content removals, Google will determine when and if your site will pop up in search.
These are relatively small steps in the grand scheme of things, but at least Google is giving deepfake and revenge porn victims a way to fight back. And if Google and other AI purveyors can get on board with rules and regulations for dealing with the issues, we won’t have to wade through government gridlock to get things done.