As a feminist activist, Caitlin Roper is no stranger to getting hate comments online. Angry men come with the territory.This time was different.Each time the Perth woman opened her phone, there was a new tirade of abuse waiting for her.Pornography, violent images, threats. Only this time, the woman in the images had her face.It wasn’t Caitlin’s body.They were deepfakes.”They had taken my image from online and used that to create a video that showed me, essentially, fellating a series of penises. And then they also created AI-generated images that showed me being tortured and murdered,” Caitlin told Mamamia.That was only the beginning.
“They undressed me with Grok [X’s AI feature]. They also sent images of weapons like guns and knives to me and then described how they intended to use them on me,” Caitlin said.
Death and rape threats became the norm.
“You f****d with gamers, now we are going to rape you,” one read.
Another: “My bat gonna fit nicely in your skull.”
Caitlin and her colleagues were doxxed — their home addresses and phone numbers shared online.
Someone even put a bounty on their heads, Caitlin said.
The abuse started after Collective Shout, an Australian not-for-profit campaigning against the sexualisation of women and girls, launched a campaign against rape content in the gaming industry.
Collective Shout had demanded payment processors — including Visa, Mastercard and PayPal — pressure Steam, the world’s largest PC gaming store, and smaller game storefront itch.io to pull hundreds of games featuring rape, incest and child abuse-themed content.
Within weeks, it worked. The payment processors began enforcing new content restrictions across gaming store platforms.
By the time it was over, Caitlin said she had endured eight months of constant abuse across all platforms, describing it as an “orchestrated campaign of cyber terror”.
The United Nations’ special rapporteur on violence against women, Reem Alsalem, went further. She labelled the backlash as “the most serious form of online violence against women human rights defenders” she had seen “in a long time.”
For months, Caitlin operated on high alert.
Each morning, she’d wake up and spend at least an hour reporting, blocking and documenting the abuse. She could never keep up.
“It would continue until I went to bed at night… And it was like that every day for months and months,” she said.
“It’s deeply traumatic,” Caitlin continued.
What struck Caitlin most wasn’t the anonymity; it was the opposite — the number of men who sent threats and abuse from accounts with their real names and faces attached.
Caitlin said police handed her a “cyber safety info sheet” and told her there was little they could do without an offender’s identity. Reporting to the eSafety Commission wasn’t that much easier.
“When you’re facing a volumetric attack, it’s just impossible,” she said.
“Every threat needs so much evidence. You need a screenshot. You need a URL. You need proof that you’ve reported it to the platform. Proof the platform has refused to take it down.”
It’s an “impossible” task when you’re deeply traumatised and in survival mode, Caitlin said — often only to find “nothing will happen anyway.”
Source: Caitlin Roper details deepfake cyber terror campaign.