MEP Schilling presses EU to enforce December nudifier app ban

Austrian Green MEP Lena Schilling says she opened her laptop one morning to find sexualised deepfakes of herself circulating online, built from footage of one of her first press conferences and digitally altered to remove her clothing. 'I felt disgusted,' she told the Guardian. She filed a complaint with the Austrian police. About a dozen sites that hosted or linked to the images were taken offline over the following days.

Her account anchors a letter signed by 119 MEPs from the EPP, Socialists and Democrats, Renew Europe, The Left and Greens, pressing the European Commission and EU governments to make an EU-wide ban on AI 'nudifier' apps and websites, which takes effect on December 2, actually enforceable. 'A ban on paper protects no one until it is enforced,' the letter argues. Schilling and German Green MEP Terry Reintke initiated it; it also calls for stricter use of the Digital Services Act against platforms and search engines that distribute or index non-consensual material.

The scale comes from a study by Agora Digitale Transformation, a Berlin think tank: 50 members of the European Parliament have been found on such deepfake sites, 46 of them women, roughly one in six female MEPs. Across 147 identified European politicians, 138 are women, and women in politics are 33 times more likely to be targeted than their male colleagues.

'I am one of 138 female MEPs affected,' Schilling said. 'Women in politics are 33 times more likely to be affected than men. We were stripped naked without our consent.' Her wider concern is deterrence: 'Every woman who wants to run for office should be able to do so without being afraid of being undressed against her will.'