According to nme.com, artist Lauren Mayberry has opened up about the impact of deepfakes, after “receiving rape or death threats on the internet” for 10 years. Chvrches‘s front woman talked about her experience of online abuse as one of the artists taking part in a new initiative called Change The Tune.

The artist mentioned how she has faced harassment online for a decade and warned that the “cyber misogyny” experienced by women and girls every day is both dangerous and isolating. Mayberry recalled how she was overly sexualized by “a lot of men” online from the very start of her career: “It’s all very sexual and sexualized all the time. And I look at that and I’m like, I was a 23-year-old girl, trying to do my job, just to write some silly songs… I didn’t know that that was going to be such a big part of it.”

In a new interview with BBC News, the artist also went on to recall how the abuse increased as Chvrches started to become successful  and how she received threats of violence online after expressing disappointment in Marshmello’s decision to work with Chris Brown and Tyga.

According to Mayberry, one person online allegedly threatened to “bash her skull in” if she continued to make comments about Brown, which caused her to hire private security at her home. Since then, Mayberry has gone on to appear in “deepfake” pornography, which is a digitally-created explicit image or video where artificial intelligence is used to impose someone’s face onto someone else’s body. The technology has been used increasingly in recent years, particularly with female celebrities.

Discussing how it impacted her, Mayberry told BBC: “It just felt like another version of the same thing… It’s like a decade of intermittently receiving rape or death threats on the internet. Even though people say ‘It’s not real, it’s not real’ Your brain does not perceive that, I don’t think. The impact of it on your psychology, it doesn’t really matter whether you think that’s real.”

Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat