PauseTalk Vol. 99 was held on Thursday, October 23 at Bananafish Books, and ended up getting the biggest turnout yet for a PauseTalk session in Shanghai, with 20 participants. It was a lively bunch, with of course a long intro roll at the start – that itself ignited a lot of questions and discussion as it was still going. Topics throughout the night ranged from community (why we join them, how to run them), whether language used influences who attends the event more than any cultural influence (i.e. why an event like PauseTalk tends to be expat heavy), some takes on fashion in the city, and yes, good ol’ AI, which tends to be a recurring theme, with strong opinions on both sides of the debate on its use. As one of the topics touched on filmmaking, and more specifically, a few in attendance had participated in the recent 48-hour Film Project, we capped it off with an impromptu viewing of the short they had produced (“The Greatest Show-Off”), which ended up winning the top prize.
What’s next? As I had shared last time, I am still planning on producing a zine to commemorate the upcoming Vol. 100, and the collecting of material for that (for those who would like to contribute a page) is likely to mostly happen in the WeChat group we have – but if you’ve ever attended a PauseTalk in the past (either in Tokyo or Shanghai) and would like to contribute something, do get in touch.
As for the next session, PauseTalk Vol. 100, that will normally happen sometime in December, and I’ll share the details here when they get confirmed. I would like to do something special for it (on top of the zine), so we’ll see what I come up with. In the meantime, the best way to stay updated is via the WeChat group (contact me to be added).
Hovertext: It's like going up to someone who doesn't know about conservation of energy, and telling them you have a wheel that never stops spinning, and expecting them to be blown away.
A new analysis of synthetic intimate image abuse (SIIA) found that the tools for making non-consensual, sexually explicit deepfakes are easily discoverable all over social media and through simple searches on Google and Bing.
Research published by the counter-extremism organization Institute for Strategic Dialogue shows how tools for creating non-consensual deepfakes spread across the internet. They analyzed 31 websites for SIIA tools, and found that they received a combined 21 million visits a month, with up to four million visits in one month.
Chiara Puglielli and Anne Craanen, the authors of the research paper, used SimilarWeb to identify a common group of sites that shared content, audiences, keywords and referrals. They then used the social media monitoring tool Brandwatch to find mentions of those sites and tools on X, Reddit, Bluesky, YouTube, Tumblr, public pages on Instagram and Facebook, forums, blogs and review sites, according to the paper. “We found 410,592 total mentions of the keywords between 9 June 2020 and 3 July 2025, and used Brandwatch’s ability to separate mentions by source in order to find which sources hosted the highest volumes of mentions,” they wrote.
The easiest place to find SIIA tools was through simple web searches. “Searches on Google, Yahoo, and Bing all yielded at least one result leading the user to SIIA technology within the first 20 results when searching for ‘deepnude,’ ‘nudify,’ and ‘undress app,’” the authors wrote. Last year, 404 Media saw that Google was also advertising these apps in search results. But Bing surfaces the tools most readily: “In the case of Bing, the first results for all three searchers were SIIA tools.” These weren’t counting advertisements on the search engines that the websites would have paid for, but were organic search results surfaced by the engines’ crawlers and indexing.
X was another massively popular way these tools spread, they found: “Of 410,592 total mentions between June 2020 and July 2025, 289,660 were on X, accounting for more than 70 percent of all activity.” A lot of these were bots. “A large volume of traffic appeared to be inorganic, based on the repetitive style of the usernames, the uniformity of posts, and the uniformity of profile pictures,” Craanen told 404 Media. “Nevertheless, this activity remains concerning, as its volume is likely to attract new users to these tools, which can be employed for activities that are illegal in several contexts.”
One major spike in mentions of the tools on social media happened in early 2023 on Tumblr, when a woman posted about her experience being a target of sexual harassment from those very same tools. As targets of malicious deepfakes have said over and over again, the price of speaking up about one’s own harassment, or even objecting to the harassment of others, is the risk of drawing more attention and harassment to themselves.
Another spike on X in 2023 was likely the result of bot advertisements for a single SIIA tool, Craanen said, and the spike was a result of those bots launching. X has rules against “unwanted sexual conduct and graphic objectification” and “inauthentic media,” but the platform remains one of the most significant places where tools for making that content are disseminated and advertised.
Apps and sites for making malicious deepfakes have never been more common or easier to find. There have been several incidents where schoolchildren have used “undress” apps on their classmates, including last year when a Washington state high school was rocked by students using AI to take photos from other children’s Instagram accounts and “undress” around seven of their underage classmates, which police characterized as a possible sex crime against children. In 2023, police arrested two middle schoolers for allegedly creating and sharing AI-generated nude images of their 12 and 13 year old classmates, and police reports showed the preteens used an application to make the images.
A recent report from the Center for Democracy and Technology found that 40 percent of students and 29 percent of teachers said they know of an explicit deepfake depicting people associated with their school being shared in the past school year.
The “Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks” (TAKE IT DOWN) Act, passed earlier this year, requires platforms to report and remove synthetic sexual abuse material, and after years of state-by-state legislation around deepfake harassment is the first federal-level law to attempt to confront the problem. But critics of that law have said it carries a serious risk of chilling legitimate speech online.
“The persistence and accessibility of SIIA tools highlight the limits of current platform moderation and legal frameworks in addressing this form of abuse. Relevant laws relating to takedowns are not yet in full effect across the jurisdictions analysed, so the impact of this legislation cannot yet be fully known,” the ISD authors wrote. “However, the years of public awareness and regulatory discussion around these tools, combined with the ease with which users can still discover, share and deploy these technologies suggests that takedowns cannot be the only tool used to counter their proliferation. Instead, effective mitigation requires interventions at multiple points in the SIIA life cycle—disrupting not only distribution but also discovery and demand. Stronger search engine safeguards, proactive content-blocking on major platforms, and coordinated international policies are essential to reducing the scale of harm.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is trying to force Meta to unmask the identity of the people behind Facebook and Instagram accounts that post about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity, arrests, and sightings by claiming the owners of the account are in violation of a law about the “importation of merchandise.” Lawyers fighting the case say the move is “wildly outside the scope of statutory authority,” and say that DHS has not even indicated what merchandise the accounts, called Montcowatch, are supposedly importing.
A new startup backed by one of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is building a service that allows clients to “orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts through both bulk content creation and deployment.” Essentially, the startup, called Doublespeed, is pitching an astroturfing AI-powered bot service, which is in clear violation of policies for all major social media platforms.
“Our deployment layer mimics natural user interaction on physical devices to get our content to appear human to the algorithims [sic],” the company’s site says. Doublespeed did not respond to a request for comment, so we don’t know exactly how its service works, but the company appears to be pitching a service designed to circumvent many of the methods social media platforms use to detect inauthentic behavior. It uses AI to generate social media accounts and posts, with a human doing 5 percent of “touch up” work at the end of the process.
On a podcast earlier this month, Doublespeed cofounder Zuhair Lakhani said that the company uses a “phone farm” to run AI-generated accounts on TikTok. So-called “click farms” often use hundreds of mobile phones to fake online engagement of reviews for the same reason. Lakhani said one Doublespeed client generated 4.7 million views in less than four weeks with just 15 of its AI-generated accounts.
“Our system analyzes what works to make the content smarter over time. The best performing content becomes the training data for what comes next,” Doublespeed’s site says. Doublespeed also says its service can create slightly different variations of the same video, saying “1 video, 100 ways.”
“Winners get cloned, not repeated. Take proven content and spawn variation. Different hooks, formats, lengths. Each unique enough to avoid suppression,” the site says.
One of Doublespeed's AI influencers
Doublespeed allows clients to use its dashboard for between $1,500 and $7,500 a month, with more expensive plans allowing them to generate more posts. At the $7,500 price, users can generate 3,000 posts a month.
The dashboard I was able to access for free shows users can generate videos and “carousels,” which is a slideshow of images that are commonly posted to Instagram and TikTok. The “Carousel” tab appears to show sample posts for different themes. One, called “Girs Selfcare” shows images of women traveling and eating at restaurants. Another, called “Christian Truths/Advice” shows images of women who don’t show their face and text that says things like “before you vent to your friend, have you spoken to the Holy Spirit? AHHHHHHHHH”
On the company’s official Discord, one Doublespeed staff member explained that the accounts the company deploys are “warmed up” on both iOS and Android, meaning the accounts have been at least slightly used, in order to make it seem like they are not bots or brand new accounts. Doublespeed cofounder Zuhair Lakhani also said on the Discord that users can target their posts to specific cities and that the service currently only targets TikTok but that it has internal demos for Instagram and Reddit. Lakhani said Doublespeed doesn’t support “political efforts.”
A Reddit spokesperson told me that Doublespeed’s service would violate its terms of service. TikTok, Meta, and X did not respond to a request for comment.
Lakhani said Doublespeed has raised $1 million from a16z as part of its “Speedrun” accelerator program “a fast‐paced, 12-week startup program that guides founders through every critical stage of their growth.”
Marc Andreessen, after whom half of Andreessen Horowitz is named, also sits on Meta’s board of directors. Meta did not immediately respond to our question about one of its board members backing a company that blatantly aims to violate its policy on “authentic identity representation.”
What Doublespeed is offering is not that different than some of the AI generation tools Jason has covered that produce a lot of the AI-slop flooding social media already. It’s also similar, but a more blatant version of an app I covered last year which aimed to use social media manipulation to “shape reality.” The difference here is that it has backing from one of the biggest VC firms in the world.
Log in
