| The European Correspondent
Dmitriy Beliaev
A Russian series released in October used AI to replace actor Maxim Vitorgan’s face – and removed his name from the credits. Vitorgan reported it himself on social media, while the streaming platform Kion offered no explanation.
It was the second time the actor had been digitally erased and replaced with AI – a punishment for his vocal opposition to the war in Ukraine. On the first day of the invasion in 2022, he posted a black square on Instagram with the caption “Shame” to his 700,000 followers. That led to his removal from another show in 2023.
Erasing “undesirable” actors, writers, and musicians has become routine in Russia, where censorship has tightened its grip on cultural life since the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
TV channels and streaming platforms now not only blur or replace actors with AI, but also cut entire scenes – scrubbing away unwanted dialogue, characters, or references that the state considers unwelcome.
In April 2025, a TV channel removed a map of Odesa and cut a reference to the 2006 deportation of Georgian citizens from Russia in a 2010 film (which also featured Vitorgan). In June, Russian streaming services removed a line mentioning Putin’s death from a 2024 Spanish thriller Rich Flu.
Censorship now extends far beyond politics, reshaping even harmless scenes: in early November, following a law banning so-called “LGBT propaganda”, a Russian online cinema cut a Fight Club (1999) scene showing men kissing.
It goes beyond films. Several broadcasters have been fined for airing music videos deemed “LGBT propaganda”. In January 2023, a court fined the TNT Music channel one million rubles (roughly €10,600) over a music video Hallucination by Regard and Years & Years.
A year later, another broadcaster, Tochka TV, was fined for airing a music video by pro-regime singer Nikolai Baskov for containing “LGBT propaganda” because of “the lyrical subject’s relationship with a male”. The video had aired on television without issue before. After the new laws came in, some Russian artists began deleting their old videos from YouTube and social media.
Publishers are also blacking out entire paragraphs in books. Even a biography of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini was censored, with about a fifth of the text removed because it described an openly gay filmmaker's personal life.
The invasion of Ukraine has triggered a kind of patriotic cultural revolution. Actors, directors, and musicians who publicly opposed the war have been effectively blacklisted – removed from the big screens, stripped of work, and, in many cases, pushed into exile. Some have been declared “foreign agents”, a status that severely restricts civil rights and professional opportunities.
Some songs by these “agents” are being removed from Russian streaming platforms, and performing them publicly can lead to fines or even arrest. For the most recent case – in October, several young street musicians in St Petersburg were arrested for singing songs by anti-war artists.
The Danish government is to clamp down on the creation and dissemination of AI-generated deepfakes by changing copyright law to ensure that everybody has the right to their own body, facial features and voice.
The Danish government said on Thursday it would strengthen protection against digital imitations of people’s identities with what it believes to be the first law of its kind in Europe.
Having secured broad cross-party agreement, the department of culture plans to submit a proposal to amend the current law for consultation before the summer recess and then submit the amendment in the autumn.
It defines a deepfake as a very realistic digital representation of a person, including their appearance and voice.
The Danish culture minister, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, said he hoped the bill before parliament would send an “unequivocal message” that everybody had the right to the way they looked and sounded.
He told the Guardian: “In the bill we agree and are sending an unequivocal message that everybody has the right to their own body, their own voice and their own facial features, which is apparently not how the current law is protecting people against generative AI.”
He added: “Human beings can be run through the digital copy machine and be misused for all sorts of purposes and I’m not willing to accept that.”
The move, which is believed to have the backing of nine in 10 MPs, comes amid rapidly developing AI technology that has made it easier than ever to create a convincing fake image, video or sound to mimic the features of another person.
The changes to Danish copyright law will, once approved, theoretically give people in Denmark the right to demand that online platforms remove such content if it is shared without consent.
“Yahoo Boy” cybercriminals are openly running dozens of scams across Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, TikTok, YouTube, and more.
Microsoft will launch digital watermarking tools to combat deep fakes and offer services to political campaigns for cybersecurity and using AI.
The “news broadcasters” appear stunningly real, but they are AI-generated deepfakes in first-of-their-kind propaganda videos that a research report published Tuesday attributed to Chinese state-aligned actors. The fake anchors — for a fictious news outlet called Wolf News — were created by artificial intelligence software and appeared in footage on social media that seemed to […]
‘Facing reality? Law enforcement and the challenge of deepfakes’ is the first report produced through the Observatory function of the Europol Innovation Lab. The Europol Innovation Lab’s Observatory function monitors technological developments that are relevant for law enforcement and reports on the risks, threats and opportunities of these emerging technologies. The report provides a detailed overview of the criminal use...
Hackers are stealing PII to apply for remote jobs and then using deepfakes to pass the interview.
