Councillor 'sickened' by deepfake video abuse

A councillor says sexualised deepfaked images and video and misogynistic posts on social media have left her feeling "sick".

Jill Salt has been a district and town councillor in Staffordshire for 12 years, but earlier this month announced she would be standing down due to the abuse she had faced on social media.

She said political attacks were nothing new, including on social media, but she said the tone had changed over the past 18 months and had become increasingly personal, targeting her as a woman, and for what she wears and what she looks like.

Salt, who was a Labour councillor, but has most recently stood as an independent, added she was proud of her party roots, but that the nature of the attacks she faced were very different from those aimed at male colleagues also on the political left.

Deepfaked images and video have become more widespread in recent years with advances in technology and AI in particular enabling people to easily create faked images mapping for example a person's face or mouth movements on to another body.

"The deepfakes that have been created are not of me, but look like me," she said.

One image of her holding an ice cream was turned into a sexualised video.

In another case, she was pictured with a cartoon body in a bikini, alongside posts mocking her.

"What were they hoping to achieve other than humiliate me?" she added.

Salt said 18 months ago she started to receive nasty comments online.

But then posts shared on a local Facebook page, followed by thousands of people, took a more sinister turn.

She discovered videos on the page of her singing and dancing. It showed her face, and an attached recording featuring offensive lyrics about her body.

The mum-of-two said she then faced a battle to get posts featured on a fake Facebook account in her name taken down.

When she contacted its parent company Meta, she said she was told the posts did not breach community standards.

Salt said they were eventually removed, but she was not sure whether they were taken down by Facebook or the administrators of the page.

In response, Meta said its manipulated media policy allowed the removal of videos that are the product of AI or machine learning, including deep learning techniques.

It said under its existing policies, once it is made aware of content, audio, photos or videos, "whether a deepfake or not, will be removed from Facebook if they violate any of our other Community Standards including those governing nudity, graphic violence, voter suppression and hate speech".

She said her concerns were initially dismissed by Staffordshire Police, adding that she had been told she should expect abuse because she was in public life. However, the force has since said it is investigating.

Speaking to BBC Radio Stoke, Staffordshire's Conservative police, fire and crime commissioner Ben Adams described the abuse Salt had faced as "totally unacceptable".

"Police will take it seriously, they won't dismiss it because you're a politician, and nor should they," he said.

"This type of activity online, it has a real impact, it is genuinely harmful. It's not someone jumping out of the bushes. It needs dealing with."

Since the local elections last month, there have been numerous reports of councillors and candidates experiencing abuse and intimidation during campaigns.

The government has previously said there is "no place in local government for bullying, intimidation or harassment".

In an effort to tackle the rise of abuse, ministers have set up a "defending democracy" taskforce.

It is hoped that bringing in measures like removing the requirement for candidates home addresses to be published should go some way to address the harassment of people in public office.

But does that go far enough?

Salt said: "It's not going to create cultural change. Something culturally has shifted in the last 18 months about how people can feel that they can treat fellow human beings".

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