A day after explicit digitally fabricated fakes of Taylor Swift began proliferating on the social-media platform X, they were still relatively easy to find on the site, prompting the singer’s fans to swarm X to try to drown out the fakes with real images and push the platform to do more to combat the fakes.
The graphic images of Swift began spreading across X on Wednesday. By the next day, a flurry of the accounts that were flagged by users for sharing the most viral images were suspended or otherwise restricted.
But the images could still be seen elsewhere on the platform, with some of the posts still getting thousands or tens of thousands of views, according to metrics from X.
X contends it works hard to combat violative content and says it has made progress in reducing the spread of hateful, illegal and other unwanted content. X didn’t respond to requests for comment about the fake images of Swift. A representative for Swift didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Some fans said they were trying to flag to X as many accounts as possible that were spreading the fake images to urge the platform to suspend those users, and posts with the slogan “protect Taylor Swift” were trending on X Thursday.
The spread of digitally altered fake pornography has become a more pressing issue as advances in generative artificial intelligence have made creating such images easier and more accessible. People ranging from celebrities to high-school students have been targets of such images.
X’s policies prohibit sharing deceptively altered and harmful media as well as posting explicit images of someone without their consent. While combating nonconsensual and fake graphic imagery is a serious challenge across social-media platforms, critics say incidents like with the images of Swift show X is especially lagging in content moderation and enforcement of its policies.
Twitter already had developed policies around altered media, said Renée DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. “What we’re seeing is a basic failure to enforce them even given the most clear-cut, highly visible incident,” she said. While Swift’s fans came out to defend her, most people wouldn’t have that kind of support available to them, she added.
Elon Musk acquired X, the social-media platform then known as Twitter, in late 2022 and quickly set about loosening many of its content-moderation rules and cutting thousands of jobs across the company, which he said was needed to stabilize the company’s financial situation.
X cut its trust and safety staff by some 30% globally after Musk’s acquisition, going from roughly 4,000 workers on such teams to about 2,850 as of May 2023, according to a report from an Australian online safety regulator.
Write to Alexa Corse at alexa.corse@wsj.com