WIRED's reporting on explicit deepfake sites targeting more than 100 European politicians shows how synthetic media abuse is becoming a public-office problem, not only a private harassment problem.
The scale matters because the same tools that target celebrities or ordinary people can also be used to intimidate candidates, distort public debate, and make democratic participation more costly, especially for women.
The practical response has to combine platform enforcement, payment pressure, takedown speed, and laws that treat nonconsensual synthetic media as abuse. Detection alone will not be enough if distribution and monetization remain easy.
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