Google Now Actively Downranking Deepfake Porn Content Sites

Deepfake porn has been under the cosh of late, and victim lobby groups have successfully pushed for new laws across the world. In the USA, the DEFIANCE act will give victims the right to sue those held responsible for the sharing of their explicit deepfaked images. There is also a separate and more draconian ‘Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act‘ recently introduced to the House of Representatives. The UK has gone further still, and will soon be making it a criminal offence to simply create any deepfake porn image on your computer. Australia plans to do the same. And now the EU is set to pass a directive that will require all member states to criminalize the sharing of non-consensual deepfake porn. But as well as demanding government legislation, lobby groups and feminist academics have also demanded that such material becomes easier to find, and in particular have called for Google to hide infamous sites such as MrDeepFakes.com. This is something that Google has appeared reluctant to do. Until now, that is.

According to Bloomberg, a Google spokesperson explained that the company is “continuing to decrease the visibility of involuntary synthetic pornography in search and develop more safeguards as this space evolves.” However, a quick Google search of ‘deepfake porn’ still shows the same familiar results, with MrDeepFakePorn still at number one. But it’s a different story if you attempt to Google a particular celebrity’s name to search for deepfake images. For example, a search for ‘Scarlett Johannson deepfake porn’ now only leads to pages of news results, rather than any deepfake porn sites. This is not enough for advocacy groups pushing for the sites themselves to be completely blacklisted by Google and other search engines.

“The deranking of deepfake porn websites by Google and other search engines is great for victims, but also the bare minimum,” said Carrie Goldberg, an attorney who represents people who have been victimized by the nonconsensual sharing of sexual material. “Google has ruined lives and is shamefully inflexible at responding to developing problems.”

Despite the dissatisfaction expressed by those urging even stronger action by Google, it appears that the measures have resulted in significant decreases in traffic for MrDeepFakePorn. According to Bloomberg, traffic to the site plummeted by 21% om the first 10 days of this month, compared to the average for the previous six months. Traffic to porn sites is, however, generally down during the Northern Hemisphere Summer months. It also might be that the extensive media coverage of deepfake porn over the last few months, and in particular the Taylor Swift scandal, would have led to mainstream news sites appearing more prominently in the search engine rankings anyway. Meanwhile, ArsTechnica.com shares the complaints that Google’s deranking policy wont stop the deepfake porn problem. Not only does it not completely hide deepfake sites that host the content, but the deranking of specific individual deepfake porn results will also make it harder for victims to find (and then report) deepfaked images of themselves.