Emma Kondrup, Anne Imouza, Catherine Regis and Reihaneh Rabbany analyze Canada’s newly passed Bill C-16 (Protecting Victims Act), which for the first time criminalizes sharing non-consensual sexual deepfakes. They argue the law falls short because it requires images to be realistic enough to ‘pass as a genuine photo,’ targets only distributors while exempting creators and facilitating platforms, and responds only after harm has occurred. The authors recommend grounding legal protection in victim identifiability rather than photorealism, extending accountability across the full deepfake creation-to-distribution chain, and adopting upstream prevention measures already used in the UK and South Korea.
