Deepfakes Make Defamation Cross-Border Litigation by Default

A deepfake rarely stays local. The clip is generated in one jurisdiction, uploaded in another, indexed everywhere, and consumed in the place where reputational harm lands hardest. That geography scramble is why cross-border defamation has become one of the sharpest liability problems in AI law: not because the legal elements are new, but because AI makes publication frictionless, provenance messy, and remedies difficult to contain.

Synthetic Media Gets Regulated

Currently, lawmakers and courts are treating synthetic media as a repeatable, scalable hazard. In the United States, the Take It Down Act became federal law on May 19, 2025, pairing criminal prohibitions with Federal Trade Commission-enforced notice-and-takedown obligations for platforms hosting nonconsensual intimate images, including AI-generated ones. A Georgia court dismissed Walters v. OpenAI on summary judgment in May 2025, showing how traditional defamation doctrines collide with chatbot outputs and user warnings.

Europe is building parallel compliance: the European Commission tied platform accountability to the Digital Services Act through the Code of Practice on Disinformation, while the EU AI Act’s staged timeline sets formal transparency obligations for deepfakes. The same synthetic clip can trigger different duties, defenses, and enforcement levers depending on where it is seen.

Jurisdiction Comes First

Cross-border AI defamation starts with jurisdiction, not truth. Plaintiffs typically want the forum where their reputation is concentrated. Defendants often want the forum where speech protections are strongest, damages are lower, or procedure is more favorable. Courts, meanwhile, must decide whether publication happened where the content was created, where it was uploaded, where it was hosted, or where it was read and understood.

Canada’s Supreme Court addressed the internet version of that puzzle in Haaretz.com v. Goldhar, confirming that Ontario had jurisdiction simpliciter over an online defamation claim while ultimately staying the action in favor of Israel as the clearly more appropriate forum. The decision is best read as a warning label: even if a Canadian court can hear an internet defamation claim, the forum fight is far from over when the real center of gravity is abroad.

British Columbia has been explicit in related platform litigation: if allegedly defamatory posts are viewed, downloaded, and accessed in B.C., the tort is treated as occurring there for jurisdiction purposes, even when the defendant is headquartered outside Canada. In Giustra v. Twitter, Inc. and the Court of Appeal decision that followed, the B.C. courts reinforced that internet everywhere can still mean jurisdiction here when harm is pleaded as local.

When Forum Wins Backfire

The United Kingdom is approaching cross-border deepfake risk from a different direction: regulatory reach rather than tort first. Under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom’s illegal content regime became enforceable on March 17, 2025, when the Illegal Content Codes of Practice took effect and in-scope services were required to comply with the illegal content safety duties. That matters for deepfake defamation because the fastest remedy is often removal or suppression, and the UK can pressure platform-side safety measures even when the uploader is outside the country.

Even after a plaintiff wins the forum fight, choice of law becomes the next battle. Defamation rules differ sharply: burden of proof, defenses, damage presumptions, and public figure standards all vary. A single AI publication can occur simultaneously in many places, forcing courts to ask whether one lawsuit should apply one law or several. Goldhar emphasized the unfairness of trying a claim in a forum with weak factual connections when meaningful readership is elsewhere. That logic maps onto deepfakes: a synthetic video may be created in one country, go viral in a second, and cause reputational harm in a third where the person lives and works.

For counsel, choice-of-law analysis is a core risk assessment, not a back-end detail. Legal posture changes depending on which jurisdiction governs: whether intent must be proven, whether damages are presumed, whether anti-SLAPP frameworks apply.

Who Published It, Legally

Deepfake defamation rarely has a single clean defendant. There is usually a stack: the user who generated or edited the synthetic content, the person or entity that deployed it in a campaign or workflow, the platform hosting and monetizing distribution, and the model developer or app provider that enabled generation or alteration.

The litigation question is often which actor made a legally meaningful publication and which had the required intent, negligence, or knowledge. Walters v. OpenAI shows one court treating user warnings and the plaintiff’s lack of reliance as central, even when the output was false and harmful.

The jurisdictional calculus is shaped by one U.S. law that does not travel: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This provision shields platforms from liability for third-party content, making it nearly impossible to sue a U.S. platform for hosting defamatory deepfakes created by someone else.

Cross-border plaintiffs often prefer non-U.S. forums for this reason. A Canadian or UK court can assert jurisdiction over a U.S. platform and issue removal orders without confronting Section 230’s immunity. Defamation plaintiffs with ties to multiple jurisdictions forum-shop away from the United States when the defendant is a platform. The Take It Down Act creates a narrow exception for nonconsensual intimate imagery, but the broader platform shield remains intact.

Platform duties are shifting faster than tort theories. A Congressional Research Service summary describes a new federal notice-and-takedown framework for nonconsensual intimate imagery under the Take It Down Act. In Europe, DSA enforcement pressure and the EU AI Act’s transparency track are pushing platforms toward standardized handling of manipulated content. Even when liability theories differ by jurisdiction, takedown workflows and synthetic-content disclosures are becoming the common denominator.

Why Winning Abroad May Not Matter

Defamation plaintiffs want three things: a declaration of falsity, money, and speed. AI deepfakes make speed the most valuable because virality outruns court calendars. Notice-and-takedown frameworks and regulator-driven safety duties increasingly matter as much as damages.

Canada has shown it will issue orders with extraterritorial effects. In Google Inc. v. Equustek Solutions Inc., the Supreme Court upheld a worldwide delisting injunction. While not a deepfake case, its logic is a template plaintiffs cite when arguing local courts can order global intermediaries to act.

The UK’s Online Safety Act takes an even more direct route by imposing safety duties on services in scope, with Ofcom’s compliance calendar forcing firms to operationalize illegal content risk assessments and safety measures. When a deepfake crosses into categories that overlap with illegal harms, the platform’s regulatory exposure may become the fastest forcing function for action.

In the EU, the AI Act’s implementation timeline matters because it effectively sets deadlines for when this is synthetic must become a compliance artifact rather than a courtesy. The EU’s official implementation timeline forecasts a progressive rollout through August 2, 2027, while transparency obligations tied to deepfakes are staged earlier in that schedule.

Formal international treaties remain sparse. However, the ongoing cooperation between EU and UK regulators on platform safety, stemming from similar regulatory impulses in the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Online Safety Act (OSA), may eventually lead to greater regulatory interoperability on enforcement measures like content removal.

Cross-border defamation has a blunt reality: a plaintiff can win a judgment in one country and fail to enforce it in another. The SPEECH Act restricts U.S. courts from recognizing foreign defamation judgments unless the foreign law provided First Amendment-comparable protections or the defendant would have been liable under U.S. standards.

If the defendant’s assets or operations are primarily in the United States, enforcing a foreign judgment can become its own litigation. This pushes plaintiffs toward forum choices that align with enforceability, or toward remedies like takedowns and injunctions that do not depend on collecting money.

Beyond Defamation Claims

Defamation law is not the only toolkit. Several jurisdictions are experimenting with identity rights and mandatory disclosure regimes that can be easier to enforce than truth-based tort claims.

Denmark moved toward a copyright-style approach giving people rights over their features, making unauthorized synthetic imitation easier to challenge through takedown demands and compensation claims. Spain advanced legislation imposing fines up to 35 million euros for failing to label AI-generated content, targeting deepfakes and aligning with the EU AI Act.

These regimes change the liability landscape by creating bases for action that do not require proving falsity or reputational harm. For companies, content provenance and labeling must be engineered into workflows, not bolted on after complaints.

What Litigation-Ready Governance Looks Like

For legal teams advising platforms, model providers, media companies, and brands, deepfake risk is now a cross-border governance problem.

Start with jurisdictional mapping: where the company operates, where its users are, where infrastructure sits, and where regulators can plausibly claim scope. The UK’s Online Safety Act compliance calendar, the EU DSA enforcement posture, and U.S. federal and state NCII laws create different obligations that can all be triggered by the same viral artifact.

Deepfake disputes are also evidence races. Preserve the first-seen version, URLs, hashes, and platform identifiers. Document notices and responses. If the dispute becomes cross-border, you need a clean record to support jurisdiction, identify defendants, and demonstrate mitigation diligence.

The fastest wins often do not require proving falsity. A labeling or synthetic-content policy violation can be more decisive than a defamation argument where regulators have created clear compliance hooks. Spain’s proposed fines and U.S. notice-and-takedown design show a parallel instinct: removal first, courtroom later.

Where This Is Heading

Deepfakes will be treated less like exotic evidence and more like routine content triggering routine controls: labeling, watermarking, provenance signals, response deadlines. The EU AI Act timeline anticipates this through progressive application dates, and the DSA-linked disinformation framework raises the compliance floor for major platforms.

Courts will keep doing what they have always done in defamation: asking whether a statement was published, whether it was about the plaintiff, whether it was defamatory, and what defenses apply. What changes is the perimeter. In AI disputes, publication can be a model output, a repost, an auto-caption, or an algorithmic amplification event. That is why jurisdiction and enforceability are now first-order legal issues, not procedural afterthoughts.

Sources

• CanLII: Google Inc. v. Equustek Solutions Inc., 2017 SCC 34 (Jun. 28, 2017)
• CanLII Connects: “Landmark Ruling Holds that Canadian Law Applies to US Social Media Giant,” by Michael Swanberg and Taylor Thiesen — Reynolds Mirth Richards & Farmer LLP(summary of Giustra v. Twitter, Inc., 2021 BCSC 54)
• Congress.gov: Public Law 111-223 – Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage Act (SPEECH Act) (Aug. 10, 2010)
• Congress.gov: S.146 – TAKE IT DOWN Act (introduced Jan. 16, 2025; signed into law May 19, 2025)
• Congressional Research Service: The Take It Down Act: A Federal Law Prohibiting the Nonconsensual Online Publication of Intimate Visual Depictions (May 20, 2025)
• Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute: 47 U.S. Code § 230 – Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material
• Council of Europe: “Liability and jurisdictional issues in online defamation cases” (2019)
• European Commission: “Commission endorses the integration of the voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation into the Digital Services Act” (Feb. 13, 2025)
• European Commission AI Act Service Desk: Timeline for the Implementation of the EU AI Act
• Euronews: “Spain could fine AI companies up to €35 million in fines for mislabelling content,” by Anna Desmarais (Dec. 3, 2025)
• The Guardian: “Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features,” by Miranda Bryant (Jun. 27, 2025)
• Knowing Machines: Walters v. OpenAI (July 14, 2023)
• Ofcom: Important dates for Online Safety compliance (Oct. 17, 2024, updated Dec. 2, 2025)
• Law Commission of Ontario: “Defamation Law in the Internet Age” (March 2020)
• Supreme Court of Canada: Haaretz.com v. Goldhar (Jun. 6, 2018)

This article was prepared for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon as such. All cases, regulations, and sources cited are publicly available through court filings and reputable media outlets. Readers should consult professional counsel for specific legal or compliance questions related to AI use.

See also: Recalibrating Competence: Updating Model Rule 1.1 for the Machine Era