What happened
On February 7, 2018, Reddit banned r/deepfakes — a community of more than 92,000 members that traded AI-generated face-swapped pornography placing celebrities and other unwilling people into explicit videos — along with related communities such as r/deepfakesnsfw, r/nsfwdeepfakes, and r/facesets. The same day, Reddit revised its site-wide rules, splitting a single combined policy into two distinct ones covering involuntary pornography and sexual content involving minors, and explicitly extending the involuntary-porn ban to faked or fabricated depictions created or posted without a person's consent.
The move came as 'deepfake' technology, which had originated and spread largely through that Reddit community, drew alarm over its potential for harassment, nonconsensual imagery, and disinformation. Reddit's action followed similar crackdowns by other platforms and helped define an early industry response to synthetic media. While the bans removed the most visible hubs, the underlying tools and content migrated elsewhere, foreshadowing years of legal and policy debate over deepfakes and nonconsensual AI imagery.