Watch this: We're not ready for the deepfake revolutionīut the bot's business strategy is also ambitious, inspired by strategies from gaming and classic promotional tropes. But "paid premium" features include sending multiple pics, skipping the line of free users and removing watermarks from the pornographic images they get in return. It's the kind of user-friendly strategy that has helped legal, legitimate apps and games like Spotify and Fortnite become worldwide phenoms.Ībusers can use the bot free by sending photos to it one at a time, seemingly up to five a day. The bot is built with a "freemium" business model, providing free users with a basic level of functionality and reserving advanced features for those who pay. In a statement, VK said it doesn't tolerate such content or links on its platform and blocks communities that distribute them. Telegram and VK were both founded by Pavel Durov, sometimes referred to as Russia's Mark Zuckerberg. Telegram is used globally, but its roots are in Russia, and links to the Telegram bot posted on VK, Russia's dominant social network, are the most common way that abusers have found the bot. These members overwhelmingly come from Russia and former-USSR countries, about 70% of those surveyed. In July, that number had swelled to at least 24,168 images, according to Sensity.Īnd while deepfake pornography has long fixated on victimizing actresses, models and other celebrity women, 70% of this bot's targets were private individuals, according to a self-reported survey of the bot's users in Sensity's report.Ībout 100,000 people are members of channels linked to the bot, Sensity found. A year ago, about 1,000 images manipulated by the bot were posted in channels in a month. The bot's promotional website suggests that as many as 700,000 images have been manipulated by the bot.Īnd the bot is growing in popularity. "But definitely we are talking about some multiplier of that 100,000." Sensity doesn't know the scope of material that is not shared, Patrini added. The 100,000-plus total number of images is limited to manipulated photos that were publicly posted and that Sensity was able to track down. While each image may not be of a unique individual, Patrini said instances of the same woman being victimized, or the same photo being manipulated repeatedly, were rare. Sensity found 104,852 images of women that were victimized by the bot and then shared publicly, as of the end of July. "They're completely open, without any login, without any passwords, on the internet. These nonconsensual sexual images have "been put out there to be found," Patrini said. The bot is also designed to make it easy for abusers to share the manipulated images by posting them in chats and other online forms. Mary Anne Franks, president, Cyber Civil Rights Initiative But the service has also taken actions to remove abuse, such as kicking off groups for violent extremists like neo-Nazis and ISIS. Telegram has been criticized for hosting terrorist propaganda and coordination, facilitating piracy and copyright infringement, and harboring varieties of predatory pornography. Telegram's tenacious commitment to free speech and privacy may make bots like this challenging to stamp out. CNET viewed galleries of images with the bot's watermark posted online and interacted with the bot itself, stopping short of uploading any photos for it to manipulate. Neither Sensity's report nor this article are disclosing the name of the bot, to avoid amplifying it. Even women out walking could be victimized if surreptitiously snapped by the wrong stranger.Īnd in one of the most disturbing forms of abuse with this bot, photographs of children have been uploaded to the bot's AI, automatically manipulated to sexualize the child and then shared publicly. With this Telegam bot, any woman who's ever posted a selfie of herself from the waist up could be a potential victim.
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