Mr. Deepfakes, a website that offers non-consensual deepfake porn, says it is shutting down and will not be coming back due to the loss of its service provider and data. "A critical service provider has permanently terminated services. Data loss has resulted in the inability to continue operations," reads a notice displayed when visitors to the site visit. As of this writing, the site's forums and videos are no longer accessible.
"We will not be relaunching. Any website claiming this is false. This domain will eventually expire and we are not responsible for future use. This message will be removed in about a week."
We don’t know why Mr.Deepfakes was shut down, which service it was removed from, and why. The site's creator remains anonymous, but in January, Germany's Der Spiegel reported that they had identified him as a 36-year-old Toronto resident who had worked at a hospital for several years.
"While this is an important victory for victims of non-consensual intimate images (NCII), this victory means too little and takes too long," Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the world's leading experts on digital image processing, told us in an email. "Those technology, financial and advertising services providers that continue to profit from and support sites like mrdeepfakes must take more responsibility for the role they play in the creation and dissemination of NCII. While this crackdown is a good start, there are many more similar incidents, so we cannot stop here."
In 2017, we first reported on the emergence of deepfake videos. The DeepFake video is named after a Reddit user of the same name who was the first to share videos of female stars swapping their faces into existing pornographic videos. Soon after, the practice spread to other corners of the internet. But no website occupies a central position in the development, distribution and monetization of deepfake porn videos like Mr. Deepfakes. Mr. Deepfakes went viral after media reports led to Reddit, Pornhub and other sites banning deepfake porn and other forms of non-consensual media.
Mr.Deepfakes allows users to upload videos on its site like other porn sites and connects users with creators who sell their services and produce videos based on user requests. These creators are often compensated through cryptocurrency. While other porn sites, social media and various internet platforms have gradually banned non-consensual synthetic sexual content over the years, with varying degrees of success, MR.Deepfake has continued to host these videos.
More importantly, the Mr. Deepfakes forum became an important resource for involuntary media creators. Users on the site flock to each other to develop new technologies, share apps and tools that help them create deepfakes, and share data sets designed to recreate specific real-life images.
DeepFaceLab, one of the most advanced and popular open source projects for creating deepfake videos, has much of its development work done by users of the Mr. Deepfakes forum. A research paper describing the DeepFaceLab approach initially credited Mr. Deepfakes with providing the forum where much of the development of Deepfakes took place. After being exposed, Mr. Deepfakes' name was removed from the paper.
While Mr.Deepfakes is gone, at least for now, the toxic legacy it left behind may unfortunately linger forever. The community it built is now connected on Telegram, where much of the same technology development and involuntary media sharing happens today. The tools and applications it promotes are also widely distributed on the Internet, and even companies like Apple and Google have difficulty blocking them from their platforms, and social media like Instagram have difficulty preventing them from advertising on their platforms.