r/deepfakes: Birthplace of Deepfake Porn and Reddit's 2018 Ban

The term 'deepfake' originated on Reddit. In late 2017, a user posting under the handle 'deepfakes' began sharing face-swapped pornographic videos that superimposed the likenesses of female celebrities onto adult performers without consent, and the surrounding community organized as r/deepfakes. The community popularized FakeApp, a desktop tool that lowered the technical barrier to producing such forgeries, and grew to roughly 90,000 subscribers. The material was non-consensual intimate imagery generated through machine learning, and reporting at the time emphasized that it depicted real, identifiable people in fabricated sexual scenarios they never participated in.

On February 7, 2018, Reddit banned r/deepfakes along with related communities including r/deepfakeNSFW, and coverage by TechCrunch, Vice/Motherboard and Variety documented that additional face-swap and fake-pornography subreddits such as r/CelebFakes and r/YouTubeFakes were also removed. Reddit acted by updating its rules on involuntary pornography and the sexualization of minors. The revised policy prohibited content depicting a person in a state of nudity or engaged in sexual conduct that was created or posted without their permission, explicitly including faked or manipulated depictions, and barred posting images of a person for the specific purpose of producing fabricated explicit content or soliciting 'lookalike' pornography.

Reddit's enforcement followed similar actions by other platforms; Twitter, Pornhub and other services moved against the same category around the same period. The bans were widely covered as a turning point because the underlying technology and the communities that refined it did not disappear. The tooling and techniques had already proliferated to other sites, and the broader phenomenon of AI-generated non-consensual imagery accelerated in the years that followed.

The long-term harm has been substantial and overwhelmingly borne by women. According to industry analyses cited in coverage of subsequent legislation, the volume of deepfakes online grew rapidly, with the great majority being pornographic and produced without the subjects' consent. High-profile incidents continued, including the January 2024 spread of fabricated explicit images of Taylor Swift on the platform X, which drew tens of millions of views before the account responsible was suspended.

The episode seeded a sustained policy and legal response. In the United States, the DEFIANCE Act of 2024 sought to create a federal civil remedy allowing victims of 'digital forgeries' to seek damages; it passed the Senate unanimously in July 2024. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, which criminalizes the sharing or threatened sharing of non-consensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated material, and requires platforms to remove it within 48 hours of a verified request, passed both chambers and was signed into law on May 19, 2025. Reddit's 2018 ban is consistently identified as the moment a fringe Reddit community gave the practice both its name and its initial mainstream momentum, foreshadowing a harm that legislators and platforms continue to confront.