Google has always allowed people to request certain content, like a malicious website or copies of your contact information, to be removed from search results. The company already had a policy for removing private images or videos, but now it’s taking fake pornographic content more seriously. Google now has a support page dedicated to removing “involuntary fake pornography,” with instructions that people can follow to report said content. For a request to be accepted, the person reporting the content has to be the person depicted in the fake imagery. The company notes that this process only removes the requested content from Google search results, not from the sites actually hosting it. This updated policy is likely in response to the growing popularity of ‘deepfakes’ - sexual videos and images where someone’s face is substituted for another person’s (usually a celebrity). As the name might suggest, deepfakes are generated using…
Fake
A realistic-looking video that seemed to show former President Barack Obama cussing and calling President Donald Trump a “total and complete dips—,” went viral on Tuesday, bringing attention to the dangers of a controversial video-editing technology that many have called “the future of fake news.” About halfway through the video, originally published by BuzzFeed, it is revealed that Obama had actually not uttered those words and that they were actually said by “Get Out” director and writer Jordan Peele, whose voice and mouth had been digitally inserted into an original — much less scandalous — video of the former president. Here’s the full video: Peele, BuzzFeed, and Monkeypaw Productions used a controversial but widely available software to make the video, in an effort to demonstrate the dangers of “deepfakes,” aka digitally manipulated videos that have the power to “make it look like anyone is saying [or doing] anything at…