The Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan bill to provide recourse to victims of porn deepfakes — or sexually-explicit, non-consensual images created with artificial intelligence.
The legislation, called the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act — passed in Congress’ upper chamber on Tuesday. The legislation has been led by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in the House.
The legislation would amend the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to allow people to sue those who produce, distribute, or receive the deepfake pornography, if they “knew or recklessly disregarded” the fact that the victim did not consent to those images.
“Current laws don’t apply to deepfakes, leaving women and girls who suffer from this image-based sexual abuse without a legal remedy,” Durbin posted on X after the bill’s passage. “It’s time to give victims their day in court and the tools they need to fight back. I urge my House colleagues to pass this bill expediently.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) praised the bill’s passage, commending Durbing for his work. “This isn’t just some fringe issue that happens to only a few people — it’s a widespread problem,” said Schumer. “These types of malicious and hurtful pictures can destroy lives. Nobody is immune, not even celebrities like Taylor Swift or Megan Thee Stallion. It’s a grotesque practice and victims of these deepfakes deserve justice.”
Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive New York lawmaker, first announced she was co-leading the bicameral legislation in an interview with Rolling Stone. She’s had personal experience with this specific type of abuse, and discussed the trauma it can cause.
“There’s a shock to seeing images of yourself that someone could think are real,” she told us in March. “And once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. It parallels the same exact intention of physical rape and sexual assault, [which] is about power, domination, and humiliation. Deepfakes are absolutely a way of digitizing violent humiliation against other people.”
In a press release following the bill’s passage in the Senate, Ocasio-Cortez said it “marks an important step in the fight to protect survivors of non-consensual deepfake pornography,” adding: “I’m committed to collaborating with colleagues from both sides of the aisle to shepherd the bill through the House of Representatives to get it to the president’s desk. Together, we can give survivors the justice they deserve.”
When the bill first came up for a unanimous vote in the Senate in June, it was blocked by Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.). The most recent version of the bill now includes a “findings” section, refining the definition of “digital forgery” and updating the available damages to ensure victims receive appropriate compensation, along with some other clarifications.
The “findings” section discusses facts previously reported on by Rolling Stone: Technology like generative AI has made it easier for people to quickly generate digital forgeries without technological experience; victims of this abuse can potentially experience depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation; the harms of this abuse are not mitigated through labels depicting the image as fake; and victims do not know how to prevent future abuse.
“I had no idea if the person who did it was near me location-wise, [or] if they were going to do anything else to me,” one survivor told Rolling Stone in our April print issue. “I had no idea if anyone who saw that video was going to try to find me. I was very physically vulnerable at that point.”
The Senate introduced the DEFIANCE Act on Jan. 30, about a week after several AI-generated, sexually-explicit deepfakes of Taylor Swift went viral on X. If the bill passes the House, it would become the first federal law to create a civil cause of action for deepfakes. There are currently a few federal statutes that can be used for criminal prosecution of deepfakes for minors, but DEFIANCE would allow both adults and minors to sue.
Past legislative efforts by Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) to rein in deepfakes were not successful. Those bills involved criminal penalties, while DEFIANCE focuses on civil legal recourse.
“It’s so important to me that people understand that this is not just a form of interpersonal violence, it’s not just about the harm that’s done to the victim,” Ocasio-Cortez previously told Rolling Stone. “Because this technology threatens to do it at scale — this is about class subjugation. It’s a subjugation of entire people. And then when you do intersect that with abortion, when you do intersect that with debates over bodily autonomy, when you are able to actively subjugate all women in society on a scale of millions, at once digitally, it’s a direct connection [with] taking their rights away.”
President Donald Trump discussing Venezuela at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Why Venezuela Could Be a Turning Point in Gen Z’s Support for Trump
When Donald Trump called himself “the peace president” during his 2024 campaign, it was not just a slogan that my fellow Gen Z men and I took seriously, but also a promise we took personally. For a generation raised in the shadow of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it felt reassuring. It told us there was a new Republican Party that had learned from its failures and wouldn’t ask our generation to fight another war for regime change. That belief stood strong until the U.S. overthrew Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Growing up in the long wake of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan shaped how my generation learned to see Republicans. For us, “traditional” Republican foreign policy became synonymous with unnecessary conflicts that caused young people to bear the consequences. We heard how Iraq was sold to the public as a necessary war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, only to become a long conflict that defined the early adulthood of many millennials. Many of us grew up watching older siblings come home from deployments changed, and hearing teachers and coaches talk about friends who never fully came back. By the time we were old enough to pay attention, distrust of Bush-era Republicans wasn’t ideological, it was inherited from what we had heard.
As the 2024 election was rolling around, that dynamic had flipped. After watching wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate headlines while Joe Biden was president, the Democrats were now the warmongers. My friends constantly told me how a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote to go to war. On the other hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans were the ones my friends thought could keep us safe. “I’m not voting for Trump because I love him,” one friend told me. “I’m voting for him because he cares about us and I don’t want to go fight in a stupid war.” For many of my friends, much of their vote came down to one question: Who was less likely to send us to fight? The answer to them was pretty clear.
Fast forward to now, and Venezuela has begun to complicate that belief. Even without talk of a draft or a formal declaration of war, the renewed focus on U.S. involvement and troops on the ground has brought back the same language of escalation my generation was taught to distrust. Young men online have been voicing the same worries, concerned that the ousting of Maduro mirrors the early stages of wars they were raised to fear. When I asked a friend what he thought about Venezuela, he shared that same sentiment. “This is how all these wars always start,” he told me. “They might try to make it sound like it’s not actually a war, but people our age always end up being the ones that pay the price for it.” For young men who supported Trump because they believed he represented a break from interventionist politics, Venezuela blurs the line between the “new” Republican Party they thought they were backing and the old one they were raised to reject.
For many young men, Venezuela has become a major part of a broader shift of how they view Trump. A recent poll from Speaking with American Men (SAM) found that Trump’s approval rating has fallen 10 percent among young men, with only 27 percent agreeing with the statement that Trump is “delivering for you”.
Gen Z men’s support of Trump was never about ideology or party loyalty, it was about the idea that he had their back and would fight for them. But that’s no longer the case. Recently, Trump proposed adding $500 billion to the military budget. Ideas like that will only hurt the president with young men. My friends don’t want more military spending that could get us entangled in foreign wars; they want a president who keeps them home and fights for their economic and social needs. As Trump pushes for a bigger military and more intervention abroad, the promise that once made him feel like a protector of young men now feels out of reach.
For my generation, Venezuela isn’t just another foreign policy dispute, it’s a conflict many young men worry they could be the ones sent to fight. Gen Z men didn’t support Trump because he was a Republican, but because they believed he was different from the old Republicans. He would be a president who would have their back, fight for their interests and keep them from fighting unnecessary wars. Now, that promise feels fragile, and the fear of being the ones asked to face the consequences has returned. For a generation raised on the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of another war isn’t abstract, it’s personal.