Mr. Deepfakes, the internet’s largest repository of nonconsensual deepfake pornography, has announced its permanent closure due to the loss of a critical service provider and data.
404Media reports that Mr. Deepfakes, the most prominent website hosting deepfake pornography, has announced its permanent shutdown. The site, which had become a hub for creating and sharing videos that face-swapped female celebrities and even unsuspecting private individuals into existing pornographic content without their consent, cited the termination of service by a critical provider and irretrievable data loss as the reasons for its closure.
A notice on the Mr. Deepfakes website states, “A critical service provider has terminated service permanently. Data loss has made it impossible to continue operation. We will not be relaunching. Any website claiming this is fake. This domain will eventually expire and we are not responsible for future use. This message will be removed around one week.”
The identity of the individual behind Mr. Deepfakes remains anonymous, although a German newspaper, Der Spiegel, claimed in January to have identified them as a 36-year-old hospital employee based in Toronto.
Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and a leading expert on digitally manipulated images, described the shutdown as “an important victory for victims of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII)” but stressed that it was “far too little and far too long in the making.” Farid called on technology, financial, and advertising services that profit from and enable such sites to take greater responsibility for their role in the creation and distribution of NCII.
Mr. Deepfakes rose to prominence shortly after the emergence of deepfake videos in 2017, named after a pseudonymous Reddit user who first shared face-swapped celebrity porn videos. As platforms like Reddit and Pornhub banned deepfake porn and other forms of nonconsensual media, Mr. Deepfakes quickly became a central hub for the development, distribution, and monetization of such content.
The site allowed users to upload videos and connected them with creators who sold their services to generate custom deepfake porn, often paid for via cryptocurrency. Importantly, the Mr. Deepfakes forums served as a resource for individuals creating nonconsensual media, with users collaborating to develop new techniques, share tools and apps, and distribute datasets designed to recreate the likeness of specific individuals.
In 2022, it was reported that DeepFaceLab, one of the most advanced and widely-used open-source projects for creating deepfake videos, was largely developed by users on the Mr. Deepfakes forums. A research paper presenting the DeepFaceLab method initially credited Mr. Deepfakes for providing the forums where much of its development took place, but the site’s name was later removed from the paper following media coverage.
Read more at 404Media here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
