Deepfakes and the Law

This collection offers the first sustained, multidisciplinary legal analysis of deepfakes and their far‑reaching consequences.

Deepfake technology has moved with disorienting speed from fringe curiosity to a global social, political, and legal problem. Once the preserve of Hollywood studios, the ability to fabricate hyper‑realistic images, audio, and video is now available to anyone with a smartphone. Its most prevalent and devastating use remains the creation of non‑consensual sexually explicit content targeting women. Yet deepfakes also fuel political disinformation, destabilise democratic processes, enable fraud and identity theft, and contribute to a broader post‑truth climate in which the authenticity of all digital evidence becomes contestable. In this landscape, one of the most urgent tasks is simply to begin the right conversations about how law and society should respond. Across three sections, various international scholars examine how synthetic media challenges foundational assumptions about privacy, image rights, evidential truth, and democratic integrity. These essays explore deepfakes’ profound impact on the individual dignity of both the living and the dead, their capacity to generate epistemic uncertainty, and the structural difficulties they pose for courts, regulators, and lawmakers. Bringing together theoretical, doctrinal, and comparative insights, the book illuminates a fragmented regulatory landscape and articulates both the pressing need for more coherent, principled governance of synthetic media, and some of the difficulties that will necessarily be encountered by those designing regulatory measures.

This is a timely and vital volume for scholars, jurists, and legislators concerned with the future of truth, autonomy, and accountability in an increasingly synthetic world.

Thomas D.C. Bennett is Senior Lecturer in Law at the City Law School, City St George’s, University of London. He is an expert in media law and writes principally in the areas of judicial methodology, privacy doctrine and theory, and defamation. His work has been published widely and internationally. He is the co-founder and co-host of The Media Law Podcast and has co-edited two previous collections published by Routledge.

Rebecca Moosavian is Associate Professor in Law at the School of Law, University of Leeds. She researches across IP, media law, legal theory, and human rights. She has published articles on the right to privacy (Art 8 ECHR), the right to free expression (Art 10 ECHR), misuse of private information, copyright, and defamation law. Her recent works have focused on the legal regulation of the individual’s image, particularly in the digital age. Rebecca is co-director of the Centre for Law & Social Justice at the School of Law, and has served as a member of the Socio-Legal Studies Association board of trustees (2019–2025) and jurisprudence stream convenor for the Society of Legal Scholars (2015–2018). She has is also deputy co-director of the SLAPPs Research Group, an independent international network of over 50 academics across 15 countries which is committed to advancing balanced, evidence-based research on strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPPs) and anti-SLAPP reform.