The European Commission has set a priority in its fight for gender equality: the digital arena. In its renewed strategy for the next five years, it recognizes that cyberviolence affects women and girls “disproportionately”. Thus, community institutions are immersed in new legislative processes to combat deepfakes and sexually explicit deepnudes, two phenomena that have multiplied with the expansion of generative artificial intelligence.
In this way, Brussels will launch what it calls “a structured regulatory dialogue” with large online platforms, based on “the robust safeguards of the Digital Services Act”. Furthermore, the College of Commissioners wants to achieve this year the full implementation of the directive on violence against women, as well as of the action plan against cyberbullying, presented just a month ago.
The Community Executive states that it will support the so-called “trusted flaggers” to report gender-based violence content on online platforms. The objective is for this material to be reported, identified, and removed more quickly when necessary, thus strengthening victim protection mechanisms in the digital environment.
The European directive that obliges to criminalize pornographic deepfakes
The truth is that the directive approved two years ago on the fight against gender violence and domestic violence obliges member states to criminalize the non-consensual dissemination of intimate or manipulated material with sexual content.
Here legislators expressly included unconsented pornographic deepfakes. European capitals have until the summer of 2027 to introduce this measure into their national legislation. Beyond the norm itself, legal doctrine expressly identifies sexual deepfakes as a form of digital gender violence that disproportionately affects women.
The European Parliament, during the debate and approval of this directive, underlined that forms of cyberviolence constitute a central part of the discrimination exercised against women, which is why they require a harmonized criminalization at European level, accompanied by reinforced protection for victims.
A pioneering legal framework in the digital space
The socialist MEP and member of the Internal Market Committee, Laura Ballarín, argues that in this process Europe is building a pioneering legal framework to protect equality also in the digital space. “The European Union is beginning to respond legally to phenomena such as deepfakes, digital harassment, or the dissemination of manipulated intimate images, which disproportionately affect women,” she explains when reflecting on the impact of the directive.
Ballarín also draws attention to the Artificial Intelligence Regulation of the European Union. As he acknowledges, its article 50 establishes transparency obligations so that content generated or manipulated by artificial intelligence “is clearly identified”. Furthermore, he underlines that the Digital Services Regulation obliges technology companies to “evaluate and mitigate systemic risks,” including the dissemination of illicit or abusive online content.
The key: apply the new rules
The European socialists consider that the key now is the effective implementation of all these measures, as well as the application of the European directive against violence against women.
As an example, they point to the fact that the European Commission has activated in recent months investigations within the framework of the Digital Services Act to analyze the possible risks derived from artificial intelligence systems integrated into digital platforms.
In January, Brussels took a new step in its digital offensive against X. This time, the Community Executive initiated a new investigation against the tech giant owned by Elon Musk for its artificial intelligence service Grok, focused on the management of its recommendation systems and on content generation.
The procedure will analyze whether the company has adequately examined and addressed the risks related to the dissemination of illegal content in the European Union. Among the elements that will be studied is the spread of manipulated sexually explicit images, as well as any other content that may constitute child sexual abuse material.
From the department of executive vice-president Henna Virkkunen highlighted that unconsented sexual falsifications of women and minors constitute a form of violent and unacceptable degradation. "With this investigation we will determine if X complied with its legal obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA) or if it treated the rights of European citizens, including those of women and children, as collateral damage of its service," stated the head of the digital area of the community Executive.
The platforms, under political pressure
For its part, the European People's Party maintains that platforms “are not mere intermediaries”, as they contribute to shaping the digital environment and benefit economically from it. Given these illegal contents, the main party in the European Parliament considers that “immediate action is not optional, it is mandatory”.
“It cannot be allowed that technology platforms obtain economic benefits thanks to these practices that undermine the rights and dignity of millions of women,” states the vice-president of the Committee on Women's Rights and popular MEP Rosa Estaràs.
The MEP also asks the States to intensify enforcement efforts, because “technology advances too fast” and the European obligation is to anticipate to protect women, our children, and all vulnerable groups, such as people with disabilities.
Strasbourg warns of the “next frontier” of gender violence
The European Parliament's Women's Rights Committee, chaired by socialist MEP Lina Gálvez, adopted in February its priorities for the UN Commission on the Status of Women. In that document, the MEPs called for a global offensive against deepfakes and AI-generated sexual content, defined as “the next frontier of gender-based violence”.
Different analyses suggest that in the world nearly 900,000 deepfakes are generated each month, a figure that illustrates the speed with which this technology is spreading. “March 8 must serve to remind us that fundamental rights must also be guaranteed in the digital environment,” concludes Estaràs. To which Ballarín adds that “it also reminds us that the fight against digital violence is one of the great challenges of our time”. The Vice-President of the European Commission Roxana Mînzatu summarizes the challenge facing the European Union in this new technological era: “Women must be as safe online as offline.”
In the current context, the protection of women's equality and dignity has also become a technological and legal battle. Europe aims to be at the forefront of that response, aware that artificial intelligence opens up opportunities, but also new spaces for violence that democracies must learn to regulate.