At least 138 women serving in national parliaments across 22 European Union countries have appeared or been mentioned on websites associated with nonconsensual sexual deepfakes, according to research seen by WIRED. Only nine male lawmakers were identified in the same analysis.
The findings show a heavily gendered abuse system, but the total includes several forms of exposure: hosted explicit material, indexes of removed content, profiles and pages that direct visitors toward generation tools. It is not a count of 138 confirmed videos.
A Search Across 160 Abusive Domains
Researcher Benjamin Shultz examined around 160 domains hosting deepfake abuse or other nonconsensual sexual material. In July, he assembled information on more than 5,800 national lawmakers from all 27 EU countries and used custom search engines to identify appearances across those sites. Members of the European Parliament were not included.
By Shultz’s calculation, women MPs were 33 times more likely than men to be targeted by the ecosystem. Politicians from Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and France appeared most often, and senior figures were more likely to be included. He notified affected lawmakers individually and provided removal guidance.
The work was published by German digital-democracy think tank Agora Digitale Transformation. Shultz is a fellow there and lead researcher at the American Sunlight Project. WIRED does not name the sites, avoiding additional traffic to abusive material.
The research offers a broad snapshot rather than a complete census. Domains can appear or disappear quickly, search tools may miss concealed pages, and a name in an index is different from a generated video. The disparity between women and men remains large across the categories Shultz recorded.
The Sites Turn Political Identity Into a Product
Some domains hosted pages containing lawmakers’ names, official photographs, social profiles or personal information. Several included body-rating features or links to so-called nudifier applications. Shultz described pages that put a person’s information beside a generation tool, allowing visitors to create new material in a few steps.
Other entries acted as gateways even where previously hosted content had been removed. That structure matters because a site can continue facilitating abuse without storing every resulting image itself.
Dutch lawmakers Suzanne Kröger and Sarah Dobbe, both affected, described the material as intimidation and belittlement. Researchers told WIRED that such attacks can cause psychological and reputational harm and discourage women and girls from entering public life. Those wider effects are expert assessments; this study did not measure changes in political participation.
Deepfake tools have become more accessible and their output more realistic since AI-generated deepfakes emerged in 2017, WIRED reports. The article describes a commercial ecosystem built to produce abuse at scale, not isolated experiments by individual users.
Takedowns Reduce Access but Not the System
The UK and EU are planning bans on nudifier services, while the US Take It Down Act has been used in a period when at least two major deepfake sites carrying thousands of celebrity images were removed. Investigations identifying site operators have also contributed to takedowns.
Before WIRED published its report, at least six domains in Shultz’s research had recently disappeared, reducing the number of depictions still reachable. In earlier work on US politicians, he observed a significant decline after sites were removed. That sequence suggests takedowns can limit distribution, although it does not prove that all material vanished or that users stopped creating it elsewhere.
Kröger called for both rapid removal and strong regulation of the technology. The study shows why those goals address different layers: victims need individual images and profiles taken down, while policy must confront tools and businesses designed to recreate them.
The current evidence captures a moving network. Its clearest conclusion is not a final total, but a pattern in which women politicians are selected at dramatically higher rates and public photographs are converted into inputs for scalable sexual abuse.
