Pennsylvania woman created deepfake images to get daughter's rivals kicked off cheer squad

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Um, if she's digitally putting minor's faces on naked bodies, how is that not a felony?

US and UK pornography laws are quite different in regards to this. I know in the UK if a type of pornography is illegal (like child pornography or bestiality), it's illegal to fake that as well and claim it's a depiction of the banned activity. But in the US "faking" such things is not illegal*. Also nude photos of minors are not inherently considered child pornography or illegal in the US (although it does sound that the ones she used would be if they depicted actual minors.)

_{*Of course, one could argue that such things would usually fail the Miller Test and be considered "obscenity" and then illegal, but those laws are almost only used against pornographers mass producing such content for profit and conviction is very hit or miss.}

If this isn’t illegal in the US, it should be. I’d really like to see someone introduce a bill to that effect.

Whether such a bill could pass Constitutional muster is a valid question.

I don’t see how it would be any more of an issue than revenge porn laws.

Whether revenge porn laws violate the First Amendment (or at the very least, how a revenge porn law would need to be written to comply with the First Amendment) is also very much an unsettled question. As far as I'm aware, everyone agrees that the state has some power to prohibit sharing revenge porn, but how broad vs how narrow the category of what can be prohibited is is still very much up in the air with no uniformity among the states. Wouldn't be shocking if SCOTUS eventually addressed that issue and imposed a standard that a lot of state's revenge porn laws wouldn't meet.

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"I don't know mechanically how she was able to do it, but I can tell you that she's an ordinary citizen — I don't know that she has any more technological proficiency than your neighbor down the street," Weintraub said

I feel like if you're a prosecutor and you're not sure how it's possible for the defendant to have committed the alleged offense, that's something you should get sorted out before you bring charges. If you're asking the question "how is this possible?", the answer may very well be "it's not." But because some cop and prosecutor decided to move forward on a case they didn't even understand, an innocent person had her reputation dragged through the mud nationally and faced criminal penalty. The scenario in which this women is guilty was, being generous, extremely implausible, whereas the truth, that teenagers lied to avoid getting in trouble for vaping, is something anyone capable of using occum's razor would come up with the day this case lands on their desk. A prosecutor has an ethical duty not to bring charges forward unless they believe they can prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt. Here, a technologically illiterate prosecutor brought forward charges that didn't pass the initial smell test without doing the bare minimum research to figure out that confirm that no, an ordinary person cannot just magically conjure up realistic deepfake videos like this