Deepfakes, $50 intimate photos amid new digital regulations

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
This is a podcast by The Straits Times.

**Lynda Hong** (0:17)
Imagine discovering that your face and voice have been hijacked, manipulated into a deep fake, and broadcast across the internet. It's a chilling violation of privacy and it proves a terrifying point. No one is immune to online harms. And as digital abuse, cyberbullying, and image-based violence become increasingly normalised, the rules of engagement are also shifting, like the Online Safety Commission, or OSC, that Singapore is officially rolling out in June, 2026
This new regulatory watchdog is designed to force tech giants to take down harmful content and give victims some respite from the harassment and bullying. But will this new law actually have the teeth to protect us? Or will trolls quickly invent new ways to circumvent the laws? To unpack the realities of digital abuse and the new legal landscape, is a lawyer who founded a non-profit organisation that helps victims with counselling and legal advice. In a twist of events, she herself became a deep fake victim recently.
Hello, I'm Lynda Hong, Assistant Podcast Editor at The Straits Times. And you're listening to In Your Opinion, and I'm joined by Stefanie Yuen Thio, Joint Managing Partner at TSMP Law Cooperation. Welcome to the show, Stefanie.

**Stefanie Yuen Thio** (1:29)
Hi, Lynda. Very good to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Lynda Hong** (1:32)
So first up, let's talk about this SG Her Empowerment or she. Why do you start this SG Her Empowerment?

**Stefanie Yuen Thio** (1:39)
We call it SHE now.
We call it SHE. In 2022, the Senior Minister of State, Sim An called me and she said, we're starting up an Alliance for Action on Online Harms.
Would I be part of that? So I'm like, sure. I think it was 2021, we were still in the throes of COVID and we attended a bunch of Zoom calls, so I thought that that was it. But after that was done, they thought, hey, everybody thought that it might make sense to have an agency that supports victims of online harms because the threat and the pain goes much deeper than you would think if you haven't actually experienced it yourself. Many more people than we realized were experiencing online harms and everybody felt that it was necessary to have an agency that would help support that. And so, with much encouragement, we set up SHE. And one of the first things that we did was set up the She Care Centre where we provide support for victims. We like to call them survivors of online harms.

**Lynda Hong** (2:43)
So how much did your own experience, because you were a victim or a survivor of a deepfake recently, so how much did this experience actually push you to actually set this up?

**Stefanie Yuen Thio** (2:54)
This experience was relatively new.
At the time that we were talking about this, deepfake technology had not hit the general public yet. And it was just joxing, it was cyberbullying that we were talking about. There was some revenge porn sharing. But things have really escalated in the last few years.
So that's just become much worse. My deepfake experience happened between the first reading and the second reading of the Online Safety Relief and Accountability Bill.
So this was very much top of mind for me. And I was on the Steering Committee for that bill, never having experienced any online harms. Lynda, to give you some context and to give your listeners some context, I'm a 56 year old woman. When you think about deepfake porn, you don't think about somebody who's got her CPF already. And yet it happened to me. Somebody took photos of me from my company website, as well as from some magazines that had been previously featured in. And they turned those photos, I mean, these were stills and mostly headshots. They turned those photos into videos of a woman with incredibly thin and long legs, clearly not mine, who was in slightly suggestive poses, a la Basic Instinct. I don't know if you remember the movie by Sharon Stone where she crosses her legs. And then there was another woman in the picture pulling me up apparently, and it was all a bit suggestive. So it wasn't pornographic, but it was very suggestive. And my son checked it out on TikTok. He counted 11 videos or photos that were shared, which is pretty incredible.
I didn't know who had done it. I didn't think that I had any enemies out there. And my big suspicion is that this was not done by somebody targeting me particularly. I suspect nowadays there's lots of bots who just create these things for fun, maybe to get more eyeballs, maybe to get more traffic. I also found that another woman friend of mine, slightly younger than me, who's in the financial industry, also had some photos and videos of her adopted. She also doesn't share anything. She's got two young daughters. So for her, it was a very real, much more painful experience, because she's thinking about how her young daughters who are in their teens are going to grow up in this world and what would happen to them if this happened. So it was quite a reality check for us.