Fake photos and videos featuring the likenesses of TikTok’s biggest female stars are circulating on Twitter, with some tweets amassing tens of thousands of views despite the platform’s rules against nonconsensual nudity.
An NBC News review Tuesday of Twitter search results for Addison Rae Easterling, Charli D’Amelio and Bella Poarch — the three most-followed women on TikTok — found multiple examples of sexually explicit and sexually suggestive deepfakes posted in a 24-hour period. Other searches turned up tweets with deepfakes that had been posted weeks ago and remained up despite Twitter’s policies banning them. A deepfake is an advanced form of manipulated media in which a person’s face or head is digitally inserted onto the body of another person.
Female TikTok stars have become prominent deepfake targets. Most deepfakes on the internet are pornographic in nature and depict celebrity women in sexual situations, a synthethic media detection firm called Sensity said in a 2019 report. The amount of pornography and deepfakes in the search results for the three female TikTok stars was striking compared to even mainstream actresses who are popular deepfake targets, like Emma Watson.
