Staffordshire councillor 'sickened' by deepfake video abuse

A councillor says sexualised deepfaked images and video and misogynistic posts on social media have left her feeling "sick". Jill Salt has been a district and town councillor in Staffordshire for 12 years, but earlier this month announced she would be standing down due to the abuse she had faced on social media. She said political attacks were nothing new, including on social media, but she said the tone had changed over the past 18 months and had become increasingly personal, targeting her as a woman, and for what she wears and what she looks like. Salt, who was a Labour councillor, but has most recently stood as an independent, added she was proud of her party roots, but that the nature of the attacks she faced were very different from those aimed at male colleagues also on the political left. Deepfaked images and video have become more widespread in recent years with advances in technology and AI in particular enabling people to easily create faked images mapping for example a person's face or mouth movements on to another body. "The deepfakes that have been created are not of me, but look like me," she said. One image of her holding an ice cream was turned into a sexualised vid