TL;DR
After the 2018 Reddit ban, deepfakes scattered to 4chan, 8chan and Voat, small dedicated forums and torrents rather than disappearing. Several of those hideouts were later removed by their infrastructure providers, not by any deepfake-specific law, and the abuse later moved to Telegram bots, nudify apps and purpose-built sites. When MrDeepFakes closed in 2025, a 2026 study found activity rose on successor sites. For creators, that means removal rights are stronger, but you must still find and file each copy.
In February 2018, Reddit banned the communities that had turned face-swapped celebrity pornography into a mass phenomenon. Coverage at the time, including a Daily Dot report by Jay Hathaway, found that the videos were harder to find but far from gone. Eight years later, that has held: every major crackdown since has moved deepfake abuse around rather than ended it.
1. February 2018: the ban and the scatter
On February 7, 2018, Reddit updated its site-wide rules to prohibit "involuntary pornography", explicitly including faked depictions, and shut down r/deepfakes and r/deepfakeNSFW. The main community had more than 92,000 subscribers.[1] Discord, Gfycat, Pornhub and Twitter announced similar bans around the same time.[1]
The content stayed online. Reporting from the time found videos being shared on 4chan, 8chan and Voat, on small dedicated forums, and through torrents. The Daily Dot reported that two video hosts, Erome and SendVid, said they would act only on DMCA complaints. Other outlets found banned clips were still easy to find within days.[2] It echoed the 2014 "Fappening" leak, where content simply hopped between hosts willing to carry it.
2. What happened to the 2018 hideouts
Several of the sites named in 2018 were later removed by their own infrastructure providers, not by any deepfake-specific law.
| Site | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 8chan | Taken offline on August 5, 2019 after Cloudflare withdrew service following the El Paso shooting; returned in November 2019 as 8kun | Slate, Washington Post[3][4] |
| Voat | Announced closure December 22, 2020 and shut down December 25 after its funding ran out | Gizmodo[5] |
Meanwhile, the abuse concentrated on purpose-built sites. Deeptrace (now Sensity) counted 14,678 deepfake videos online in 2019, roughly double the prior year. Of those, 96% were pornographic, and all of that pornography depicted women. More than 13,000 of the videos sat on just nine deepfake-specific porn sites.[6][7]
3. From forums to bots and apps
The next shift went from celebrities on tube sites to ordinary people on messaging apps. In 2020 Sensity reported a Telegram bot that "undressed" photos of women. At least 104,852 women had been targeted as of July 2020, most of them private individuals, and the volume of images grew 198% in three months.[8][9]
Diffusion models and "nudify" apps then removed most of the technical barrier. Home Security Heroes' 2023 census found 95,820 deepfake videos online, 98% of them pornographic and 99% of the subjects women.[10] In January 2024, explicit AI images of Taylor Swift spread on X and 4chan. One post was reported to have been viewed more than 47 million times, and X briefly blocked searches for her name.[11]
98%
of deepfake video content catalogued in 2023 was pornographic.
Home Security Heroes, State of Deepfakes
4. Law and platform pressure catch up
- Search. On July 31, 2024, Google said it would demote sites with high volumes of removals for fake explicit imagery, filter similar results after a successful removal request, and reduce exposure to explicit image results for certain queries by over 70%.[12]
- United States. The TAKE IT DOWN Act was signed on May 19, 2025. Since May 19, 2026, covered platforms must offer a removal request process and remove intimate images, and known identical copies, within 48 hours of a valid request. The FTC began enforcing this in May 2026 and has warned companies that it will act against non-compliant platforms.[13]
- United Kingdom. The Online Safety Act 2023 made sharing intimate images without consent, deepfakes included, a criminal offence. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 extended liability to creating or requesting such images, in force from February 2026.[14]
5. The biggest hub falls, and the activity moves
MrDeepFakes, the largest dedicated deepfake porn site with around 6 million monthly visitors, closed on May 4, 2025. Its operators blamed a "critical service provider" that terminated service, and said they would not relaunch.[15][16] The closure came shortly before the TAKE IT DOWN Act was signed.
An arXiv study published in February 2026 looked at what happened next. It found requests for and sharing of synthetic non-consensual intimate imagery increased on successor sites and forums: one alternative site hosted 359,400 posts in its AI/Fakes/Celebrities categories versus MrDeepFakes' 48,734 total posts. The authors concluded that deplatforming a major hub, even alongside an imminent regulatory signal, "primarily reallocates activity across the ecosystem rather than suppressing it."[17]
“
Deplatforming a major hub primarily reallocates activity across the ecosystem rather than suppressing it.
”— arXiv, Deepfake Pornography is Resilient to Regulatory and Platform Shocks (2026)
6. What this means for creators
The 2018 lesson still applies: there is no single place to remove content from. Each shutdown, whether by a platform policy, a hosting provider or a law, scatters copies to new hosts, so a one-time takedown leaves you exposed to the next re-upload.
- Removal rights are stronger than in 2018 (48-hour platform duties in the US, search demotion at Google), but you still have to find each copy and file each request.
- Monitoring has to be continuous and image-based, since files are renamed and re-hosted. See how leak monitoring works and how creator content gets re-distributed.
- Know which route fits: DMCA takedown vs. deepfake removal, and the platform policy changes of 2026.
- Sites differ in how quickly they respond to reports, so our platform response-time leaderboard can help you decide where to focus follow-up effort.
Sources
Sources
- 1. TechCrunch, Reddit bans 'involuntary porn' communities that trade AI-generated celebrity videos (2018) ↩
- 2. The Register, It took us less than 30 seconds to find banned 'deepfake' AI smut (2018) ↩
- 3. Slate, 8chan Is Back as 8kun ↩
- 4. The Washington Post, 8chan is back online, this time as 8kun ↩
- 5. Gizmodo, Far-Right Reddit Clone Voat Has Shut Down ↩
- 6. Deeptrace, The State of Deepfakes: Landscape, Threats, and Impact (2019) ↩
- 7. CNN Business, The number of deepfake videos online is spiking. Most are porn ↩
- 8. MIT Technology Review, A deepfake bot is being used to "undress" underage girls ↩
- 9. Forbes, Bot Generated Fake Nudes Of Over 100,000 Women ↩
- 10. Home Security Heroes, State of Deepfakes ↩
- 11. PBS NewsHour, X blocks some Taylor Swift searches ↩
- 12. MIT Technology Review, Google is finally taking action to curb non-consensual deepfakes ↩
- 13. FTC, FTC Begins Enforcing the TAKE IT DOWN Act ↩
- 14. Doughty Street Chambers, The legal response to AI-generated sexual deepfakes ↩
- 15. NPR, Major deepfake porn site shuts down ↩
- 16. 404 Media, Mr. Deepfakes Says It's Shutting Down for Good ↩
- 17. arXiv, Deepfake Pornography is Resilient to Regulatory and Platform Shocks ↩
