New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Friday, May 8, directed the removal of the deepfake videos of Congress Member of Parliament (MP) Shashi Tharoor, in which the Thiruvananthapuram MP has been wrongly depicted as praising Pakistan.

The court while passing the ordered to protect  the personality rights of the politician issued summons to the Central government and social media intermediaries including Meta and X (respondents) on Tharoor’s suit to take down deepfake videos and protect his personality rights.

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Justice Mini Pushkarna passed the blocking order of the alleged deepfake videos. Tharoor had in his suit, argued that there has been a malicious campaign orchestrated by unknown infringers across various digital platforms. The politician pointed out that the fraudsters weaponised artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to generate hyper-realistic audio-visual deepfakes by cloning his face, voice, vocabulary, and mannerisms.

The alleged deepfake video of him showed praising Pakistani foreign policy as “absolute brilliance,” leading to misunderstand and misrepresent his stance on both global and domestic stage. The suit said that the fabricated videos maliciously depict Tharoor making politically sensitive statements that he never made, including ‘Pakistan is faring much better diplomatically than India’ and praise for Pakistan’s diplomatic strategies as ‘absolute brilliance’.

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The suit added that such content is calculated to mislead the public and has caused serious harm to Tharoor’s credibility, reputation, and public standing, resulting in significant mental anguish and harassment.

Notably, Tharoor joins the long list of actors, cricketers and other notable personalities who have approached the High Court in recent years over their personality and public rights. Earlier, actors such as Anil Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan have secured injunctions against unauthorised use of their name, voice, image and likeness, particularly in advertisements, merchandise and AI-generated content.