Fake porn, smears, and harassment: Beijing’s “public security” at work
This is an opinion piece by SD’s Laura Harth.
Warning: This post contains fake explicit sexual imagery.
We have the receipts. Time for our governments to grow a spine.
In recent weeks, AI-generated sexualized images of me have circulated on social media. I am sharing some of them in this piece. I have nothing to be ashamed of. The pervert in this story is not me.
Democratic governments have decided this kind of imagery is serious. In the United States, First Lady Melania Trump championed the Take It Down Act, signed into federal law in May 2025; the first conviction came down last month. Australia’s Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Act 2024 criminalized the creation and non-consensual sharing of sexual deepfakes, with penalties of up to seven years’ imprisonment; the first guilty plea came down in April this year. France amended its Penal Code in 2024; the UK criminalized both the sharing (2023) and the creation (2026) of sexually explicit deepfakes; South Korea criminalized even the viewing of non-consensual deepfakes. Canada and Spain are in the process of criminalizing the same conduct.
Italy criminalized harmful deepfakes after Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was herself targeted. She could defend herself, she said. Many others cannot.
Each of these laws also obliges social media companies to remove such content - and increasingly to prevent it from appearing in the first place. X did remove most of the images against me within days.
But time and again, the perpetrator who is creating them is allowed to walk away scot-free, ready to produce the next batch of smears and fabricated accusations.
It is no secret who is behind these images.
In February 2026, OpenAI named Safeguard Defenders as a target of what it called “industrialized transnational repression from China using AI”, run through an account tied to Chinese law enforcement. The same operators ran a campaign to discredit Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, traced by OpenAI to AI-generated content circulating on X, YouTube and Japanese platforms. Meta has identified the same network - Spamouflage - as the largest covert influence operation in the world and traced it to Chinese law enforcement. The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted forty officers of China’s Ministry of Public Security in connection with it. The European External Action Service classifies China’s conduct as “clearly illegitimate”, aimed at “suppressing information outside its borders”. Microsoft, Graphika, NewsGuard, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Freedom House, the U.S. State Department, and the EEAS have, by name, documented the campaign against my colleagues and me.
Safeguard Defenders is a small human rights organization registered in Madrid. We work to protect human rights defenders in and from China, and document the Chinese Communist Party’s widespread and systematic human rights abuse, at home and abroad. In September 2022, we published the first of two reports exposing over 100 clandestine Chinese “overseas police stations” operating in more than 50 countries - instruments of transnational repression in blatant violation of other nations’ sovereignty. The campaign against us began the same month. It has not stopped.
Over four years, the same regime that demands to be taken seriously as a great power has accused me and my colleagues - men and women alike - of an inventive range of crimes. Affairs with politicians on three continents. Corruption. Working for foreign intelligence. Terrorism. And, in one memorable episode, illegal wildlife hunting.
Sexualized fabrications are also not new: Chinese dissidents have long suffered such abuse. Such campaigns reach our partners, parents, friends. This is what a “global superpower” spends its public security resources on.
Some may say I am only amplifying Beijing’s smears by republishing some of the graphic images they produced. I sure do not relish these images being out there. But I refuse to give the perverted minds in Beijing the satisfaction of my silence - and yes, these are the same perverted “public security” minds that the country leading last year’s G7 efforts on countering transnational repression signed a Memorandum of Understanding with in January.
Like myself, others have spoken up and continue to do so, often in the face of dire consequences to themselves and their families. The incessant campaign against my organization is but one of many; the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to censor, suppress and silence know no borders.
Western governments know all of this. Their own institutions wrote the reports. The response has been not nothing, but not nearly enough. Bravery should not be met with silence when the perpetrator is China.
We have the attributions. We have had them for years. What we need now is concrete action and accountability. None of this requires more evidence. All it requires is political will.
France has neglected to carry forward the G7 momentum on countering transnational repression during its presidency this year. Italy - where I live - is the only G7 country that has not even begun debating response measures.
Prime Minister Meloni, you said deepfakes are a dangerous tool. You said you could defend yourself, and that many others cannot. Deepfakes are but one of the many tools employed by the communist regime in Beijing - as your government knows all too well, in light of the expulsion of eight Chinese nationals on national security grounds earlier this year.
Prime Minister, transnational repression is as real as these images are fake. Put the issue where it belongs: not in the footnotes, but at the top of the agenda.
Defend us.
