Fake online images of Taylor Swift alarm White House

The White House said on Friday it was alarmed by fake online images of the pop singer Taylor Swift and stated that social media companies have an important role to play in enforcing their own rules to prevent the spread of such misinformation.

Fake sexually explicit images of Swift proliferated across social media this week, including one image shared on X, formerly Twitter, that the New York Times said was viewed 47 million times before the account was suspended.

The deepfake-detecting group Reality Defender said it tracked a deluge of nonconsensual pornographic material depicting Swift, particularly on X. Some images also made their way to Meta-owned Facebook and other social media platforms.

"Unfortunately, they spread to millions and millions of users by the time that some of them were taken down," said Mason Allen, Reality Defender's head of growth.

"This is very alarming. And so, we're going to do what we can to deal with this issue," White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a news briefing, adding that Congress should take legislative action on the issue.

Lax enforcement against false images, possibly created by artificial intelligence (AI), too often disproportionately affects women, Jean-Pierre said.

"So while social media companies make their own independent decisions about content management, we believe they have an important role to play in enforcing, enforcing their own rules to prevent the spread of misinformation, and non consensual, intimate imagery of real people," Jean-Pierre said.

"Our teams are actively removing all identified images and taking appropriate actions against the accounts responsible for posting them," the safety account of X wrote in a post early Friday morning. "We're closely monitoring the situation to ensure that any further violations are immediately addressed, and the content is removed."

Meanwhile, Meta said in a statement that it strongly condemns "the content that has appeared across different internet services" and has worked to remove it.

Researchers have said the number of explicit deepfakes has grown in the past few years as the technology used to produce such images has become more accessible and easier to use.

In 2019, a report released by the AI firm DeepTrace Labs showed these images were overwhelmingly weaponized against women. Most of the victims, it said, were Hollywood actors and South Korean K-pop singers.

(With input from Reuters, AP)