On the necessity of criminalizing revenge porn and deepfake pornography

Abstract

The accessibility of social media and artificial-intelligence-based content editing applications serves as a good starting point for the dissemination of new types of content, such as revenge porn and videos manipulated by algorithms (deepfake). The dissemination of such content does not constitute a standalone criminal act in the Hungarian penal code. In other countries, there is a lively legislative debate on the criminalization of these acts. The fact that the USA, Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom took the first steps towards solving the issue shows that this is a problem that is independent of countries and regions and should be accounted for. One of the main questions of future legislation is whether the harm caused to the individuals could justify the preliminary ban of these content and the restriction of freedom of speech by criminal law. The gaps in the state laws that are still quite rudimentary are filled by platform providers via private regulation. This is welcomed on the one hand as minimal protection of the users is ensured. However, it poses several problems as each platform regulates the same phenomena with different rigor and with a different approach.