Human rights activist Laura Harth helped to expose an illegal Chinese police station in New York. Immediately, bizarre and sexualized slurs—for example that she had an affair with former Democratic Party vice presidential candidate Tim Walz—began circulating online. That was four years ago.
Then in April, an uptick: AI-enabled deepfake porn images of Harth started circulating online. She is far from alone.
For Su Yutong, an activist from China, the sexual harassment began 15 years ago with online accusations of promiscuity and photoshopped nude images. Today she wakes up nearly every day to deepfake porn images purporting to be her, she said in a Newsweek interview.
Deepfakes Amplify a Long-Running Campaign
Women who take on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have long been targeted in coordinated, online sexual harassment campaigns. These campaigns are massive in scale and driven by state-linked actors in China, technology companies like Meta and OpenAI have said.
What is new is that some are pushing back by calling out the behavior and publicizing the images. This week Rome-based Harth went public with the images on the website of her employers, Safeguard Defenders. She told Newsweek that the shame was not hers, but her attackers’.
“I don’t identify with these images at all, and I hope that is a taboo we can break. Because that’s not you. That’s an image of the CCP,” Harth said.
As for the people—probably mostly men—running the campaigns: “It’s up to you to explain it to your wife,” she said.
Su also agreed that Newsweek could publish versions of the false images of her. Newsweek removed too-explicit details and the result can be seen in the main image in this story, below.
A Global Network of Harassment
Newsweek spoke to four women who are politically active who say they have been the targets of such campaigns. They live in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy.
All were certain that the attacks come from China and increased when they engaged in campaigns or published reports, or coincided with specific events sensitive in the Chinese political calendar, they said. All want the authorities where they live to take action to stop it.
The accounts spreading such material, such as @HongHongLee1, are usually taken down. But they pop up again in a game of whack-a-mole on X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and dozens of smaller forums, according to reports by the technology companies that operate the sites. They are part of documented, multi-year, malign online campaigns linked to individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement, the companies say.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. did not respond to a request for comment.
Sex Kompromat Designed to Shame
An expert on intelligence matters told Newsweek that the situation was “classic sex kompromat”, a Russian term for material designed to entrap and discredit. One image of Su includes text in Russian.
Women are targeted in this way, because “shame is a very feminine vulnerability,” said Nathalie Vogel, a research fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C.
Previously, security agencies in repressive regimes such as East Germany or the Soviet Union used doppelgänger, or body doubles, to film or trap people, Vogel said.
“The Stasi [East German secret police] had a formidable collection of look-alikes for such operations,” she said.
“But the age of AI has revolutionized the techniques of kompromat,” Vogel said.
Canada-based political commentator and CCP critic Zang Xihong uses the online pen name Sheng Xue. She also supplied Newsweek with explicit, fake images.
Some had landed in the email inboxes and mobile telephones of people at a democracy event in Canada even as Zang was on stage addressing the audience, she said. “People said to me, ‘hey you are very beautiful.’ But it wasn’t me,” she said.
“They don’t use this on men. Because it doesn’t really hurt men,” she said.
Laws Struggle to Keep Up
Zang said the Canadian authorities failed to help. “I went to the police station, but the police officer said they couldn’t do anything, because I am an adult.”
In the U.S. the first conviction for creating AI-generated obscene material took place in Ohio in April, following passage of the Take It Down Act last year.
The law to prosecute harmful deepfake images was championed by first lady Melania Trump. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni posted a fake image of herself in lingerie in March to warn about the phenomenon, which she called cyberbullying. Italy legislated against AI deepfakes last year.
“I think that’s the best way to deal with it. The law,” said Zang. “But to get China to stop, to admit they’re doing it, that’s very, very difficult.”
The harassment works, Zang said. “Attacking women like this is an old tactic. It’s one reason why there are relatively few female Chinese dissidents.”
‘Misogyny and Control’
Su agrees that it can work. A long-term campaigner, she recently participated in an action to project a video of the democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo, who died in a prison hospital in China in 2017, onto the Chinese Embassy in Berlin.
She was first “politically slut-shamed,” as she says, in 2011, when unknown persons spread online rumors that she had had an affair with the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. The techniques have become more sophisticated, but the goal was the same: reputational damage.
“If you are seen as a ‘loose woman’, you become a socially distrusted person. It destroys your reputation in China. The Chinese Communist Party is using the most ugly side of Chinese culture, which is this misogyny and control. It uses shame and sex to try to shut you up,” Su said.
Su also deals with the physical consequences of the online harassment: her address in Berlin has been circulated by malicious actors. Strange men ring her doorbell looking for “the Asian prostitute,” she told Newsweek.
Currently, Chinese police were harassing about 20 of her family members and friends in China across three provinces and cities, Su said.
Taking Back Control of the Narrative
Not all targets choose the path of calling out their attackers by making the images public.
In an interview, democracy activist Carmen Lau, who lives in exile in London, said that she was still unsure about that tactic.
Lau suffered a wave of harassment late last year in the form of letters containing fake sexualized images of her that were distributed to about a dozen neighbors.
The harassment had begun years ago, in 2019, when fake videos of a purportedly naked Lau began circulating in her hometown of Hong Kong. It was around the time of elections in the city that Beijing opposed and Lau was a prominent, youthful democracy campaigner. She subsequently left the territory and in December 2024, local police placed a bounty on her head.
“I haven’t made up my mind,” Lau said in an interview. The distress is real: “On the outside your image as an activist is quite tough, and I shouldn’t be let down by these incidents. But on the other hand as a woman it has impact, from different perspectives. So I’m still struggling to handle the emotions.”
Harth understands the difficulty.
“It’s a perennial exercise in downsizing the risk in your mind. It obviously impacts you. It’s designed to make you paranoid and feel unsafe and that also happens. It has changed me as a person. There are better days and some days that are not so good,” she said.
As a non-Chinese woman with no family in China, Harth said that it was easier for her to go public.
“Obviously compared to the vast majority of the victims, I’m in a very privileged position and I do feel that I have more leeway to be more open about it, and also a responsibility to be more open about it,” she said.