Last year, a Reddit user known as “deepfakes” used machine learning to digitally edit the faces of celebrities into pornographic videos, and a new app has made the process much easier to create and spread the videos online. on Friday, chat service Discord shut down a user-created group that was spreading the videos, citing their policy against revenge porn.
Discord is a free chat platform that caters to gamers, and has a poor track record when it comes to dealing with abuse and toxic communities. After it was contacted by Business Insider, the company took down the chat group, named “deepfakes.”
A company spokesperson told BI that the group violated its rules against non-consensual pornography, and that such violations warrant “an instant shut down on the servers whenever we identify it, as well as [a] permanent ban on the users. We have investigated these servers and shut them down immediately.”
The group included several channels dedicated to how to create the doctored pornography, and another shared the videos. The group reportedly contained at least 150 users. This latest move comes shortly after The Daily Beast uncovered hundreds of images of explicit images on the site.