138 women MPs, 9 men: inside the deepfake sites that keep a catalogue of faces
A researcher scanned about 160 deepfake porn domains across the European Union. Almost 150 politicians were on them — and nearly all of them were women.
Benjamin Shultz took the names of more than 5,800 national lawmakers across the European Union, put them into custom search engines in July, and checked around 160 websites that host deepfake abuse and other nonconsensual sexual content. He found at least 138 women members of parliament from 22 EU countries who had appeared or been mentioned on those sites. Male MPs mentioned in any way: nine.
By his calculation, a woman in parliament is 33 times more likely to be pulled into this than a man. And the sites are not only videos. Some pages read like a directory: name, official photo, sometimes social media profiles or personal information, sometimes a section rating the woman's body — with a link sitting right there to a tool that claims to digitally undress people. "It has all the images, all the information, and a direct link to the tool, and in three clicks you can generate," Shultz says.
This is the part most people miss. The story is usually told as if deepfakes are made by one creep with a laptop. What the research describes is closer to a shop: a shelf of ready-made faces, a search function, and a button. The hard part of abuse — finding a target, collecting good photos of her, having a tool that works — has been done in advance and left open to anyone who wanders in. "These platforms are designed to run like businesses," says Henry Ajder, an AI adviser who has tracked this ecosystem since 2018. "The whole infrastructure is set up to do this at scale with ease."
Members of parliament are the easiest people in Europe to defend. They have press officers, party lawyers, security briefings and a direct line to the people who write the laws. They were still listed, rated and linked to an undressing tool — and most of them had no idea until a researcher emailed them individually with instructions on how to try to get the content taken down.
If that is the level of protection at the top, work out what it is for everyone else.
And the targets were never only politicians. The same sites carry celebrities, journalists and other public figures, and the underlying tools have already reached ordinary life: nonconsensual AI images and videos have turned up at almost 100 schools around the world. The mechanism that catches a Dutch MP is the same one that catches a 15-year-old whose classmate has her Instagram photos. The only difference is that nobody writes a research paper about the 15-year-old.
Anyone whose face is online in decent resolution — which is almost everyone under 40. If you have public photos on a profile, you have supplied the raw material; that is the whole cost of entry now. It hits hardest on two groups. Teenagers and students: this has already happened at almost 100 schools around the world, and the person doing it is usually someone in the same building. And young women weighing up whether to be visible at all — to run for something, to post under their own name, to take a job where they speak in public. Shultz says the damage is not just now: it follows people who later want to leave politics and build another career. Suzanne Kröger, the Dutch MP who was targeted, put it plainly: "We are politicians, we have a platform and speak out. But meanwhile, there are millions of women victims of these criminal acts."
Two things are worth watching, and both come straight from the research. First, takedowns: ahead of publication, WIRED found that at least half a dozen of the domains in the study had recently disappeared from the web. When sites hosting US politicians were taken down after Shultz's 2024 analysis, he says there was a "significant decrease" in depictions of those American politicians — so removal does measurably work, at least for a while. Second, the law: both the UK and the EU are planning bans on nudify services, and in the US at least two major deepfake websites have been taken offline under the Take It Down Act. No dates were given for the UK or EU bans. Shultz is also researching how many UK and US politicians appear on these sites; when that lands, we will know whether Europe is unusual or ordinary.
The videos are not the worst part of this research. The worst part is the directory page: a name, an official photo, a rating of her body, and a link to the tool. Nothing on that page is illegal-looking. It is a filing system, built patiently, waiting for visitors. Someone sat down and organised it.
Sources: WIRED, "Sexually Explicit Deepfake Sites Target 100-Plus Politicians in Europe" by Matt Burgess, Sep 14, 2026; research published by Agora Digitale Transformation.
Исследование 160 сайтов показывает, что порно-дипфейки стали индустрией с «каталогами» жертв и кнопкой «раздеть» — и если так поступают с депутатами, то обычную женщину защитить некому.
Written by THE TELL’s AI newsroom. how we work · corrections