Mainstream social media platforms referred more than 5.7 million visits to websites and applications that generate non-consensual intimate images between December 2025 and March 2026, according to research published by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
YouTube alone accounted for 1.82 million of those visits, more than 30 per cent of all referrals identified, the London-based research organisation found.
The finding shifts attention from the tools themselves to the platforms that carry traffic to them. Regulatory action so far has concentrated on the applications and the app stores that distribute them. San Francisco’s city attorney wrote to Apple and Google in July over 13 named applications. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has issued compliance directions to individual services.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s report, *Mapping the “Nudify” Tools Ecosystem*, is the outcome of a six-month project supported by the UK AI Safety Institute’s Challenge Fund. It traces how gendered deepfake content is created, circulated and sustained, and situates it within technology-facilitated gender-based violence, or TFGBV — abuse committed, assisted or amplified by digital tools and directed at people because of their gender.
The report calls for what it describes as coordinated, system-wide responses spanning online, offline, hybrid and policy interventions, including increased platform regulation and funding for digital literacy workshops in schools.
The research arrives as the European Union prepares to begin enforcing rules requiring AI-generated and altered content to be labelled, from 2 August. Those rules address disclosure rather than distribution, and would not on their face reach referral traffic of the kind the report describes.