Editor’s note: Kara Alaimo is an associate professor of communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her book “Over the Influence: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — And How We Can Take It Back” was recently published by Alcove Press. Follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Bluesky.
If your child hasn’t seen a deepfake of someone associated with their school, it’s likely that a friend or their teacher is aware of one.
Deepfakes are inauthentic images, videos or audio recordings created by artificial intelligence that appear real but have been digitally manipulated, or faked.
Forty percent of students and 29% of teachers said they were aware of a deepfake of someone associated with their school that was shared in the last school year, according to a recent survey by the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that focuses on digital rights.
Fifteen percent of students and 11% of teachers were aware of deepfakes of people at their school that were intimate or sexually explicit.
I recently saw how deepfakes can play out in schools when I agreed to be an expert in a legal case involving a teacher accused of creating nude deepfakes of his students. According to my research, when real or fake nude images of a person end up online, it can put the victim at greater risk of depression, suicide and sexual assault. It can also make it harder for victims to date or find a job, because these images could turn up when people search for them online.
Yet most students, teachers and parents said their schools have not shared policies and procedures with them about deepfake nonconsensual intimate imagery, including 57% of high school students, 62% of secondary teachers and 67% of parents of middle and high school students, according to the Center for Democracy & Technology survey.
Instead of trying to prevent these incidents, the study found schools tend to act once they’ve happened. Then they focus on punishing perpetrators without providing appropriate support to the victims, the survey found.
So what are parents to do? With schools often failing to take measures to protect students, parents need to talk to their kids about why they should never create or engage with intimate deepfakes.
Educating kids about the harms
Even when deepfakes aren’t real, parents should discuss that their harms can be. Lindsay Lieberman, a Washington, DC-based attorney who represents victims of deepfakes, said, “The technology is so sophisticated that it looks like it is my client, and the harm can be just as profound as if it was actually my client’s body.”
Victims often “experience psychological harm, including significant distress, anxiety, depression, a sense of humiliation and helplessness, and some even report having suffered post-traumatic stress disorder,” she warned.
They also frequently suffer emotional and social harms. “This kind of humiliation, whether it’s her body or not, can cause her to lose friends; it can damage her reputation,” Lieberman said. “It can make her afraid to show up in online spaces which she might need to do for her college applications or for her future career. Some victims wind up not being able to attend school because they’re suffering so much.”
Victims often face financial harm, she added, because many hire companies to try to remove the content from the internet.
That’s why we need to teach kids not only that they shouldn’t create deepfakes but also why they should never engage with them by sharing or liking them.
In having these conversations, parents should lean into empathy by asking their kids to imagine how they would feel if it happened to them, said Dr. Devorah Heitner, the Chicago-based author of “Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World.” “All young people recognize that we don’t want to be part of victimizing others. We don’t want to be part of making other people feel less safe.”
Protecting kids from becoming victims
Parents also need to educate their kids about the risks of becoming victims.
“I always encourage parents to delay social media and phone use for as long as possible,” Lieberman said. “But if your kids are on social media, you want to talk to them about privacy settings and making sure that they know every single person that they are connected with, and that can see their content.”
By sharing content privately — only with people whom they’ve accepted as friends or followers — children can make it harder for strangers or people they consider untrustworthy to access photos of them that can be manipulated.
When I speak to students in schools about deepfakes and other dangers they could experience on social media, I also advise them to talk offline to the people who send them friend or follow requests to confirm they are the ones who created the accounts.
Lieberman also recommended that parents model good cyber hygiene by being careful what they share online. She said parents should make sure kids know that if they see deepfakes they can come to them for help without worrying about being punished.
While it’s important not to minimize the harms victims experience, Heitner said that parents should also teach children that they can recover if it happens to them. “We also don’t want to tell girls, ‘This has happened to you, now you’re broken. You can never date. You can never move forward,’” she said.
It’s important, Heitner noted, to “treat people who are survivors like survivors and not just victims, and give them opportunities to find community, to move on and to recognize their own strength.”
Supporting victims of deepfakes
Lieberman said parents and victims can report incidents to the police and FBI, but she also advised reaching out to nonprofits for support, including the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network and National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Parents can reach out to a lawyer if they or their child are victims, and Lieberman said victims shouldn’t assume they can’t afford one. Many lawyers — including Lieberman —offer free consultations, and they sometimes take contingency cases in which they’re only paid if the victim gets paid by winning a judgment or receiving money in a settlement.
While schools clearly need to educate children about deepfakes and implement policies to protect them from becoming victims, it’s essential for parents to warn children about how they can protect themselves and avoid participating in this form of sexual abuse.
