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Canada Has a New Law to Stop Deepfake Nudes. Will It Work?
Penalties under Bill C-16, coming into effect this month, include up to 10 years in prison
Published 6:30, JULY 8, 2026
In January of 2025, Lucy and her boyfriend, Steve, were waiting at his house for their friend Bobby. They planned to drive to a roller rink outside Toronto and ring in Steve’s eighteenth birthday (I’m using pseudonyms to protect their privacy). Then Lucy’s phone rang: it was Bobby’s girlfriend. She had gone through his phone and discovered sexual photos of multiple girls from their friend group. One was of Lucy, eighteen at the time. She believes Bobby scrolled through Steve’s Instagram page, found a picture of her, and then ran it through a nudifier—a tool that uses artificial intelligence to digitally remove a person’s clothing from a picture, creating a synthetic nude image that isn’t real but designed to pass as one.
“My boyfriend was his best friend. I felt really betrayed and dehumanized,” Lucy says.
When young people come across non-consensual AI-generated content depicting them, they may not contact a lawyer or the police. Instead, they often turn to the internet, searching for advice. For Lucy, that search started on Reddit. As the original picture used in the AI image was from when she was seventeen, she reasoned, it could be considered child sex abuse material (also known as CSAM). This could possibly make it a criminal act. But the image was still “fake.” The nude body in it, although attached to a real photo of her face, was not explicitly hers. It wasn’t clear to her whether Bobby’s creation and possession of such an image would be considered a crime.
Lucy then moved on to online legal sites, browsing other forums for answers. And while she didn’t find any outright “Yes, this is illegal” or “No, it’s not,” she did discover posts from other young women also looking for solutions. “I saw a couple [posts] where this happened where their boyfriend would do this to them. Sometimes their brother’s friend. I was like, Okay, I’m not going insane. This is the real way [I’m] feeling.”
The posts Lucy saw seemed to reveal a pattern. The images are often created by someone within the victim’s social circle and are tied to dynamics of control, power, and humiliation, rather than just sexual desire.
According to a statement from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, “over 90 percent of deepfakes available online are non-consensual pornographic clips of women.” As of October 2022, there were over 57 million Google search results for “deepfake porn” globally. A 2024 report from the United Nations shined an especially harsh light on Canadians’ use of generative AI. A survey of law enforcement across Canada, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and Nigeria found that Canada is seeing the widest range and highest volume of AI-generated CSAM.
To combat this scourge, the federal government last December set out to make significant amendments to the Criminal Code. It introduced Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act, which, among other provisions, aimed to make the distribution of such images a punishable offence. The murky legal landscape that Lucy navigated is now poised to change, with the bill—which carries a maximum penalty of up to ten years in prison—having received royal assent in June and coming into force this month.
I imagine news of the new law would come as relief to the countless Canadians affected by sexual deepfakes. When I began reporting this story late last year, I found innumerable social media posts from women who were desperate for a legal recourse.
On a Reddit forum, r/LegalAdviceCanada, a user named Andie wrote that someone sent her an AI-generated photo of her naked: “The guy that sent it to me said he found it on Reddit. But, I’m pretty sure he made it and I’m hoping it’s not been posted online. . . . After telling him I was going to the authorities he blocked me. I don’t know if this would be considered revenge porn? Or if this is even illegal at this point? But it feels bad.”
Responses poured in, with two users suggesting Andie pursue legal action. Others cited the ambiguity of the Criminal Code. After some research of her own, Andie responded that she was not aware of any legal precedent in her situation: “I have contacted my local police department and have yet to hear back.” Another stranger said: “This is why our grade school teachers were so eager to warn us about posting images online.”
As of this writing, Andie has yet to share an update on her situation (she did not respond to requests for an interview). It’s unclear if she ever took the case to court.
Key to the whole issue is how easily these realistic images are now being created with the help of AI. Nudifying apps like DeepNude use the technology to analyze a photo—body shape, pose, lighting—and generate an artificial nude image that’s blended with the subject’s real face. The result is something that appears shockingly authentic but isn’t a photograph of the person’s actual body. This created severe complications in court in the absence of a modern law that reflected current realities: when an image wasn’t wholly a “real photo,” it became harder to prosecute under provisions that hinged on whether it depicted a person’s actual body.
Robert Diab, a professor in the Faculty of Law at Thompson Rivers University, in Kamloops, British Columbia, has reflected on this grey zone in his writing. While CSAM laws could apply when minors were depicted, protections for adults were less clear. Laws governing non-consensual intimate images were written with real photographs in mind and would not extend to AI-generated deepfakes.
When Diab and I spoke in December, it was just eight days after the minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, Sean Fraser, announced the introduction of Bill C-16. One of the amendments, Diab said, would make creating and distributing deepfakes “clearly criminal.” The new amendments to the Criminal Code add the phrase “made by any electronic or mechanical means” when it comes to a visual representation, along with “if the depiction is likely to be mistaken for a visual recording of that person.”
The language is rock solid, according to Diab. Technological terminology is constantly evolving. What is called a “deepfake” today may have a completely different name in ten years. By using the broad but concise term “electronic or mechanical means, it would clearly capture that kind of conduct,” he said.
Natasha Dixon, executive director of the Digital Sexual Violence Support Centre, who is based in Toronto, points to a different complication that will likely persist even once deepfakes are criminalized in Canada. A deepfake posted publicly on social media from anonymous accounts doesn’t tell you who produced it, making it harder to go after culprits even as the women depicted in the images face real damage.
One case brought before Justice Brian G. Puddington in October of 2025 revealed the constraints that even a well-meaning justice system faced. A man identified as R. K. 1 was charged after allegedly sending two images of his wife in a state of undress without her consent to an unnamed man: one of her in a bra and one that had been digitally manipulated to place her head onto a nude body. R. K., the wife, argued that the non-consensual distribution of these images was a violation of section 162.1(1) of the Criminal Code. But the judge ruled that the images did not meet the definition of “intimate image.”
With regard to the digitally altered image, Justice Puddington wrote that “it is not her nude body and it is not her breasts—both of which are necessary to meet that definition,” the court document reads. “Given that the photo in question is clearly not a photo of R. K.’s nude body, or her breasts, the photo does not fall within the definition of intimate image.”
In his conclusion, the judge wrote he was sympathetic to R. K., as she had to endure viewing and describing the images in a courtroom full of people, and also as the photos may have made their way into the public domain. But “I must apply the law dispassionately, and not try to shoehorn images into a definition simply because I find the photographs deplorable.”
It was far from the first time that the law had failed someone seeking help after having non-consensual intimate images made of them. In 2024, a journalist at the Toronto Star broke the story of a high school boy who had used AI to make nude images of teenage girls he knew. Toronto police reportedly told the girls that, as the boy did not distribute the images, the case would fall under Canada’s private-use exception, which allows someone to possess—without being criminally liable—sexual material involving minors in very limited private circumstances.
Suzie Dunn, an assistant professor at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law (and also a member of The Walrus’s Educational Review Committee), told the Toronto Star at the time that the exception as it might apply to deepfakes had never been tested in court. When I spoke to her, she remained hesitant about whether it holds up legally. “When you’re using a generative AI program, you’re engaging in a more shared process. And when you engage in a shared process, the private-use exception no longer applies,” she said.
With technology evolving rapidly, new cases have continued to emerge thick and fast. In May, following a multi-jurisdictional investigation, Ottawa police laid charges against a man from Ontario and one from Nova Scotia who allegedly AI-generated intimate images depicting up to twenty-five victims. That was only two months after another Nova Scotia man accused of creating deepfakes of his high school classmates was acquitted on similar charges. As for young women who come forward and are often told what’s happened to them is not illegal, Dunn says, “I think that’s a really disappointing experience for a lot of individuals who’ve been harmed in this way.”
Bill C-16 won’t alter the outcome of past cases. While the changes it brings will be too little, too late for some, others hope it will address some of the legal gaps that have enabled the menace of sexual deepfakes. And it’s a menace that’s fast gotten out of hand in recent years.
Alexios Mantzarlis, the director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech—an education hub focused on improving cybersecurity and privacy—suggests in a 2025 article for Indicator that the audience for nudify tools is expanding rapidly. He reported that, last October, the app ClothOff drew nearly 2 million visits in just one month, more than double its average traffic earlier that year. In his article, Mantzarlis writes that ten of the top AI nudifying websites his team tracks received more than 10 million visits that month, a 4 percent increase from half a year earlier. Before it shut down in May 2025 shortly after being contacted by a group of publications, including the CBC’s investigative unit, MrDeepFakes was home to tens of thousands of non-consensually made deepfake videos, some extremely violent in nature. It’s reported the site had received over 18 million visits in March 2025 alone.
According to Mantzarlis’s article, the technology is no longer confined to fringe corners of the internet; it is being marketed and integrated directly into mainstream platforms. Between September and December 2025, Meta reportedly ran more than 9,000 ads for nudifying apps across Facebook and Instagram, bringing the total number of such ads on its platforms that year to over 25,000. And over the past two years, Grok, the AI chatbot embedded in Elon Musk–owned X, has gained image- and video-editing capabilities.
The risks of that expansion became apparent quickly: an investigation by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in just the eleven days from December 29, 2025, to January 8, 2026, Grok generated an estimated 3 million sexualized images, including 23,000 depicting children. It wasn’t until January 14, after criticism from lawmakers from across the world, that restrictions to X users’ access to Grok’s image-editing services were implemented. What’s more, while Canada’s new legal provisions criminalize individuals sharing non-consensual AI-generated deepfakes, the companies that develop, host, or promote the tools used to create the images are beyond the law’s scope.
At the same time, the nudifying platforms have a vast reach, and their victims often also include public personalities. Take Sarah Z, who runs a YouTube channel with over half a million subscribers. She began receiving messages on her Tumblr and Instagram in 2025, warning that deepfake videos of her in sexually compromising positions were circulating online. “When these images are posted anonymously, you literally know nothing about the person on the other side,” she said. “Are they in my city? Or are they in a completely different country or continent?”
Yao Zhang, a forty-year-old activist based in Quebec, is originally from China. She is a commentator on YouTube and an open critic of the Chinese Communist Party. Around the autumn of 2024, AI-generated topless photos depicting her began to circulate online. She saw them mostly on X, where they were spotted even in replies to posts from then prime minister Justin Trudeau and the official Government of Canada account.
Her first order of business was to go to her online community. On September 19, she created a YouTube video and posted it for her roughly 180,000 subscribers. “I just publicly showed people, okay, this is fake. That’s not me. And I believe this is the Chinese government doing this. And if you want to scare me or humiliate me in this way, it won’t be successful,” she told me.
Following this online bombardment, Global Affairs Canada issued an official statement warning Canadians of a China-linked “spamouflage” campaign, with AI-generated deepfakes in the hundreds being posted daily to intimidate critics. “I think if the Canadian government didn’t push X, I don’t think X would [delete] it so fast,” Zhang said.
To better understand the rates of reported cases until Bill C-16 was passed, I approached police departments in Canada’s major cities. The Vancouver police said the search for the requested records would take eighty hours over five to six months, while the Montreal police said outright they could not provide the data as there was no specific crime code for AI-generated pornography, meaning the information would need to be compiled manually.
The responses pointed to the severe underreporting of deepfake pornographic images in Canada so far. “The research that we’ve done [shows] most people aren’t going to go to the police,” said Dunn. “Most people are not going to go to a lawyer. They’re going to tell their mom.” It remains to be seen how the new stricter penalties change this scenario.
More than a year later, now nineteen-year-old Lucy still thinks about the image. “It feels like a really unclosed chapter of my life,” she said. The fallout was difficult for her. She and Bobby shared classes. Peers at her school made light of the situation. Some urged her to forgive him. Then Bobby stopped going to school. And soon it was June. Her friend group graduated, and some moved away.
Lucy, Sarah, and Zhang each told me very different stories connected by the same underlying theme. The law is only starting to catch up to their everyday reality. And until it does, even though the shame does not belong to them, the systems that allowed this abuse to proliferate make it easy to feel otherwise.
Elizabeth Sargeant is a freelance journalist based in Toronto and a story producer for factual docu-series.
Vartika Sharma is an illustrator whose work has been featured in the New York Times, Vox, and Vanity Fair, among other publications.
