There's a fake video of you going around.
What do you do?

So this just happened to you. Read this before you do anything.

Your hands are shaking. Your chest is tight. The video is right there, with your face on it, saying something you never said, and the view count keeps climbing. Every part of you wants to fix it this second. Stop for ten seconds first. What you do in the next few minutes matters way more than what you do in the next few hours, and the move that feels most obvious is usually the one that makes it worse.

Hold onto this: it's fake, and being fake is the whole point of the crime. A real photo can't be undone. A fake one can be reported, fingerprinted, and taken down — and the person who made it is the one who broke the law, not you. You're not in trouble. You're the target. That's a completely different thing.

Why your first instinct is the wrong one

Your brain is screaming three things at once: delete it, tell everyone it's fake, and find out who did this. All three feel like taking control. All three usually backfire.

Deleting it off your own phone does nothing — it's already on 30 other phones — and it wipes the evidence you'll need to get it pulled down. Jumping into the group chat to yell "THIS IS FAKE" backfires too: it tells the algorithm and the group that this thread is hot, more people open it, and to half the chat "it's fake" somehow reads like you're protesting too hard. And confronting whoever made it just tips them off to delete their account and the original file before anyone can prove they did it. The person who made this wants a reaction. Every reply, every repost, every dramatic story feeds the thing. Your most powerful move is to go quiet on the thread and loud everywhere else — to the platform, to an adult, to a report form. Boring on the outside. Brutal for whoever did it.

Do this in the first 10 minutes

In order. You don't have to feel calm to do these — you just have to do them.

1. Screenshot everything. The video or photo, the usernames who posted it, the time, the group name, the view count. Capture the actual messages, not just the file. This is your evidence and it vanishes the second someone gets nervous and deletes. Do this before anything else.
2. Save the link and the usernames somewhere safe. Copy the post URL, the profile handles, anything that points back to where it came from. Drop it in your Notes app. Platforms and police can do a lot with a link and a username; they can do nothing with "it was somewhere in the chat."
3. Tell one adult you trust. A parent, a counselor, a teacher, an older sibling — pick the one you can actually talk to. Yes, even though it's mortifying. Especially because it's mortifying. They've seen worse than you think, they can make calls you can't, and you do not have to carry this alone. This is the step people skip out of shame, and it's the one that changes everything.
4. Report it on the platform. Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Discord all have a report button for fake, AI-generated, or non-consensual content — tap the post, hit report, pick that reason. Reporting from inside the app is faster than anything else and it's logged. The Common Sense Media guides show where the buttons live on each app if you can't find them.
5. If it's sexual or a fake nude, report to NCMEC now. Stop the list and go straight to the NCMEC CyberTipline at report.cybertip.org or 1-800-843-5678. A fake nude of someone under 18 is treated as child sexual abuse material — the system takes it dead seriously and it exists to help you, not to get you in trouble. Then use StopNCII.org, which makes a digital fingerprint of the image so partner platforms block it from being re-uploaded, and you never have to send the actual file to a human. You can also report it to the FBI.

Why it's not your fault and not your shame

You didn't do anything. You didn't pose for it, send it, or agree to it. Someone fed a few photos of your face — the kind anyone can grab off a public profile — into an AI tool and generated a lie. The technology is the weapon. You're the person it was aimed at. The shame you're feeling right now belongs to whoever made it, not to you, even though your body is trying to hand it to you instead.

It helps to know how easy this got, because the easiness is exactly why it isn't on you. One open face-swap model, one 30-second clip of someone's voice off their own TikTok, and the output looks real enough on a phone screen to fool a whole grade. Researchers at Northwestern Kellogg found people tell AI-generated faces and voices apart only a little better than flipping a coin. Adults get fooled too. So when someone says "well it looks real," that's not proof of anything about you — it's proof the tech is good and the law is still catching up. Don't let "but it looks real" turn into "so it's kind of my problem." It isn't.

It's fake — but the takedown still matters

People will tell you to "just ignore it, everyone knows it's fake." Ignoring the chat drama? Good advice. Ignoring the report? Terrible. Fake content still spreads, still gets screenshotted, still resurfaces months later when you'd forgotten about it. The point of reporting isn't to win an argument about whether it's real. It's to get it pulled down, get it fingerprinted so it can't be re-uploaded, and leave a paper trail with a date and a username on it — so if it ever comes back, there's already a record of exactly when it started and who started it.

The legal side is real, not a scare tactic. In most US states and under federal law, making or sharing a sexual deepfake of a minor is a crime, full stop — "everyone knew it was fake" is not a defense for the person who made it. Harassment, impersonation, and most schools' conduct codes can apply to non-sexual fakes built to humiliate someone too. That's the whole reason step one is screenshots: evidence is what lets your school, the police, the FBI, or the FTC actually act instead of shrugging. You preserve it now so an adult can use it later.

Quick answers

For parents reading this

If you're a parent who landed here, start with Deepfake Scams Teens Fall For (And How to Spot Them) — detection limits, recovery pathways, and what to actually say to a teen who just got targeted. For the sextortion and fake-nude angle specifically, read AI "Nudify" Apps and Deepfake Nudes at School — A Parent's Guide, which walks through reporting to NCMEC and StopNCII and how to work with the school.