EU Socialists draft a bloc-wide ban on harmful deepfakes

The Socialists and Democrats group in the European Parliament is drafting tech objectives that call for an EU-wide ban on harmful, non-consensual or deceptive deepfakes, and would put the duty to stop their spread on platforms and AI providers instead of on the people targeted.

A draft of the group's tech objectives, seen by POLITICO, calls for that ban and would require platforms and AI providers to prevent the spread of deepfakes rather than wait for victims to complain. It states the group's own priorities. It is not legislation and it specifies no mechanism for a ban. POLITICO's Milena Wälde reported the draft on October 20, 2026.

The German S&D MEP Tiemo Wölken, a key legislator on Parliament's copyright and AI report, told POLITICO that the divergence of national rules is the problem. "The current trend towards different national solutions only creates legal confusion bad actors could exploit," he said.

Denmark introduced a plan this month to amend its copyright law to bar sharing digital replicas without consent, the bill POLITICO links as L49 in the Folketing's document system. Per POLITICO's account, it would protect faces, voices and other identifying characteristics, target public distribution rather than private creation, and allow exceptions for parody, satire and criticism. A separate provision would protect actors and musicians against AI imitations of their performances; that general protection is non-transferable, while the performers' right could be licensed.

Cyprus amended its copyright law in March 2026, becoming the first EU member state to legislate against deepfakes through copyright, according to the Kluwer Copyright Blog. Belgium's Chamber of Representatives published a proposal on September 7, 2026, DOC 56 1728/001, by Leentje Grillaert and Steven Matheï, for a new neighboring right over a person's image and voice. The Netherlands ran a consultation on draft legislation from October 30 to December 31, 2025. Germany's Cabinet backed a draft law on October 7, 2026 that would create a criminal offense for making and distributing intimate material including sexualized deepfakes, and for impersonation that seriously damages a person's reputation.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni applied to the European Union Intellectual Property Office on October 5, 2026 to register a four-second recording of her voice as a sound mark, POLITICO reported.

Existing EU rules take a different route. The AI Act sets transparency requirements, and the Commission's page on the framework says providers of generative AI must make AI-generated content identifiable and that deepfakes must be clearly labeled. The Digital Services Act governs how platforms handle illegal content. That page also records that the AI Omnibus added a prohibition on AI systems that generate non-consensual sexually explicit content, the so-called nudification apps, due to take effect in December 2026. None of the three creates a general EU-wide right over a person's likeness.

On March 10, 2026, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on copyright and generative AI that calls on the Commission to investigate measures to protect individuals against manipulated and AI-generated image, audio or video content imitating their personal characteristics without consent, and states that digital service providers must act against that use of a person's body, facial features and voice.

Research published in October 2026 by Agora Digitale Transformation, a Germany-based civil society group, found 50 MEPs, 46 women and four men, depicted in or associated with deepfake pornography, roughly one in six women in the Parliament. The researchers searched the names of all 720 MEPs against 200 domains between September 26 and 30 and found eight MEPs, all women, depicted outright in manipulated sexualized imagery.

Legal academics are split on the copyright route. Stina Teilmann-Lock, an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School, told POLITICO that digital identity protections should not be built into copyright law. "Don't bake it into copyright," she said. "Because then you just create problems for copyright and you might not solve the real issue." João Pedro Quintais, an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Information Law, said the gap is ownership: "What you don't have very clearly is an ownership claim in EU law." Bernt Hugenholtz, a law professor at the same university, said the volume of national proposals is itself an argument for action: "The mere fact that we are seeing now so many national proposals being floated, that in itself is already a reason for the EU to do something."

Leentje Grillaert, the Belgian center-right MP who co-sponsored her country's proposal, pointed to cases of doctors being impersonated in misleading online videos and said Brussels is moving in the right direction, but not fast enough. "I think they are going in the right direction at EU level, but we want to make sure that, like in Denmark and the Netherlands, we go further and move a bit quicker," she said. Christel Schaldemose, the Danish S&D MEP involved in the March resolution, wants the Commission to answer it. "I would now like the Commission to respond to Parliament's call and assess whether EU-wide legislation would add value alongside national initiatives such as Denmark's," she said.

For anyone generating video, the draft sets out where the group wants the rules to land. A duty on AI providers would reach the tools that render a likeness as well as the platforms that host it, and the objections above leave the legal route unsettled.

The Commission's targeted consultation on EU copyright rules, opened on September 29, 2026, closes on November 10, 2026.