Deepfake: Fake Kiss Photo of Georgia Mayor Outran the Law

A mayor in Georgia opened her phone and found a photo of herself kissing a man. He wasn't her husband. And the kiss never happened.

Her name is Bianca Motley Broom

Her name is Bianca Motley Broom. She's the mayor of College Park, a city just south of Atlanta. According to an expert at Georgia Tech, the image is almost certainly made by A.I. He put the odds that it's fake at just a hair under one hundred percent. But by the time anyone said that out loud, the photo was already out there. People had seen it. People had shared it. If you've ever posted a picture of your face online, someone could do this to you. That's an uncomfortable thought, and it's okay to sit with it for a second. Mayor Broom says the law should give people like her a way to hold the creator accountable. In Georgia, right now, it doesn't really. So what happens when a lie moves faster than the law built to stop it?

Start with what Georgia already has on the books. In the spring of twenty twenty-five, lawmakers passed a deepfake law called Senate Bill Nine. It's a serious law. But it aims at specific crimes. Fake sexual images made without consent. Child exploitation. Election fraud. A fake photo of a kiss doesn't fit neatly into any of those boxes. It can still wreck a marriage, a reputation, or a career. The law just wasn't written with that kind of harm in mind.

Georgia isn't alone in that gap. Before twenty twenty-four, only five states had laws about A.I. deepfakes in elections. Now it's thirty-one. That's fast movement for state legislatures. But most of those laws focus on two things, elections and sexual imagery. Everyday harassment, the kind meant to embarrass or isolate one person, lands in a gray zone. For lawyers, that means building a case out of older laws that were never designed for this. For the rest of us, it means the most common kind of fake might be the least protected.

Then there's the clock

Then there's the clock. Researchers who track deepfake takedowns say timing changes everything. A fake that's been spreading for less than a day is much easier to contain. Once it's been out for three days or more, it's a different problem entirely. And most of the damage happens in the first hour or two. That's usually before any moderation team even notices.

Want to see how fast that is? According to the detection company Reality Defender, fake images of Taylor Swift drew forty-five million views in about seventeen hours before they came down. A fake photo of Pope Francis in a puffy designer jacket passed twenty million views. Forty-five million people. Before anyone pressed delete. And deleting doesn't end it. These images get re-uploaded, copied to new accounts, and passed around in private group chats. Sometimes they're back within hours.

This isn't only about famous faces, either. The Federal Trade Commission logged more than a million impersonation scams last year. Losses tied to deepfakes reached into the billions of dollars. That's grandparents getting fake calls. That's workers wiring money to a boss who was never on the line.