Mr Deepfakes, believed to have been the world’s biggest site for deepfake porn and regularly accused of being a haven for nonconsensual explicit deepfake content, has shut down.
The site was notorious for featuring swathes of deepfake porn video content depicting female celebrities, and was largely viewed as a symbol of the sinister side of deepfake AI technology. In 2022 it was revealed that Mr Deepfakes had 13 million visitors each month and 250,000 members.
This week (beginning May 6, 2025) the Mr Deepfakes site was not accessible, with the homepage displaying a message stating that “a critical service provider has terminated service permanently.”
The message (pictured below) continued: “Data loss has made it impossible to continue operation. We will not be relaunching. Any website claiming this is fake. This domain will eventually expire and we are not responsible for future use. This message will be removed around one week.”
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The person or people behind Mr Deepfakes officially operated anonymously, but earlier this year Spiegel identified a man named David D as one of those behind the site. He was reportedly 36 years old at the time of Spiegel’s reporting, was living in Toronto, had worked in a hospital and was believed to have launched various dubious websites.
In 2022, a man behind the site spoke anonymously to the BBC about Mr Deepfakes, attempting to justify its spreading of nonconsensual deepfake porn. “I think that as long as you’re not trying to pass it off as a real thing, that shouldn’t really matter, because it’s basically fake,” he said. “I don’t really feel that consent is required. It’s a fantasy, it’s not real.”
While the Mr Deepfakes shutdown message vaguely suggested that some kind of “data loss” was responsible for the site’s termination, the shutdown comes at a time when various governments are cracking down hard on deepfake porn.
Around one week before Mr Deepfakes was taken down, the Take It Down Act was passed by US Congress (pictured below). The Act is expected to be signed soon by President Donald Trump, and will make sharing sexually explicit photos and videos without the consent of people depicted in the content, including AI-generated deepfake adult content, illegal.
Under the new law, individuals who share nonconsensual porn featuring adults online face prison sentences of up to two years. For sharing nonconsensual explicit material featuring minors the maximum prison sentence will be three years.
The UK is also set to make sharing non-consensual deepfake porn illegal.
Henry Ajder, who works as an AI and deepfake adviser to major tech firms and governments, said: “Mr Deepfakes was created in 2018 to replace the original r/deepfakes subreddit. Its growth in content and users since then shows this shutdown is not due to a lack of demand.”
“Like the closure of the original r/deepfakes subreddit, Mr.Deepfakes will almost certainly be replaced by another platform,” he added.
Still, the demise of Mr Deepfakes was celebrated by many of those who had campaigned against nonconsensual deepfake porn.
Laila Mickelwait, founder of Traffickinghub and staunch anti-deepfake campaigner against porn sites, said on X.”Congrats to the survivors and advocates who have been pushing for this mega abuse site to be held accountable!”
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