Austrian MEP Lena Schilling Urges the EU to Enforce Its Coming Ban on Nudifier Apps

Austrian MEP Lena Schilling has spoken out about sexualised deepfakes made from her own press photos and is pressing the European Union to make its coming ban on nudifier apps enforceable, The Guardian reported on 18 October.

Her account puts a name and a face on a problem that researchers say is now aimed squarely at women in public life. It is also a leadership story, because she chose to speak about something many people targeted in this way prefer to keep private.

What happened to her

According to The Guardian, Schilling, a member of the European Parliament for Austria's Green party, learned last month that nude deepfakes of her were circulating online. When she opened the links, she saw photos from one of her first press conferences, digitally altered to remove her clothing.

"I felt disgusted," she told the paper. She described remembering how nervous she had been before that press conference and how much she had prepared for it, which made the misuse of those images especially hard to take in.

It was the Berlin based think tank Agora Digitale Transformation (ADT) that alerted her to the images. She described them to The Guardian as a form of "digital violence against women."

What the research found

ADT's report found that 50 members of the European Parliament had been targeted by sexualised deepfakes, and that 46 of them were women. The Guardian reported that this works out to roughly one in six female MEPs.

The think tank said the finding showed deepfake pornography had become a "systemic threat to women in European politics." An earlier ADT report, according to the paper, found that 138 female parliamentarians from 22 EU countries had been affected, and that women were 33 times more likely than their male colleagues to be depicted in or associated with deepfake pornography.

Those numbers matter beyond Brussels. They describe a risk that now comes with visibility itself, and that risk falls far more heavily on women.

The push to enforce the ban

A ban on apps and websites that use artificial intelligence to undress images of women is scheduled to take effect across the EU on 2 December, The Guardian reported. Schilling and German MEP Terry Reintke initiated a letter, signed by 119 MEPs, asking officials to make sure that ban comes with mechanisms that can actually enforce it.

"A ban on paper protects no one until it is enforced," the letter said, according to the paper. It pointed to how widely these nudifier tools are used, with a photo of a woman altered in a single click.

Schilling told The Guardian the aim is to push national authorities to close loopholes and workarounds that would let the apps keep operating in the EU. She said she decided to speak up in the hope that her story would encourage member states to act.

Why speaking out is a leadership choice

Schilling said some of the other women MEPs who were targeted have been afraid to come forward. Her message to them, as reported, was simple: they did nothing wrong, and there is nothing to be ashamed of.

That framing is worth noticing for any woman who leads in public. Shame is what keeps this kind of abuse quiet, and quiet is what lets it spread. By describing what happened in plain terms, Schilling moved the conversation from embarrassment to accountability.

She also connected the issue to who gets to lead at all. "Every woman who wants to run for office should be able to do so without being afraid of being undressed against her will," she told the paper.

What women leaders can take from this

You do not need to sit in a parliament to face this risk. Founders, executives, creators and community leaders all have public photos online, and the same tools can be pointed at any of them.

A few steps can help if it happens to you or someone on your team. Save links and screenshots before content disappears, report it to the platform, and tell someone you trust rather than handling it alone. Leaders can also make it clear, before anything happens, that a targeted colleague will be supported and not judged.

Policy will take time to catch up, and the December ban is only one part of that. In the meantime, the clearest lesson from Schilling's story is that silence protects the people misusing the tools, not the women in the pictures.