Two offences, one headline

The sharpest problem sits on the surface. The lede says a man “has been arrested on suspicion of making ‘deepfake’ porn videos” [1]. The police’s own statement, quoted further down, says he was “arrested on suspicion of distribution with intent to cause alarm, distress and humiliation” [1], and the article itself says the investigation “centres on the offence of sharing an intimate image or film of someone” under section 66B(2) and (10) of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 [1]. Making and sharing are different acts. The article reports one, quotes the legal basis for the other, and never notices the gap. A reader finishes the piece believing creation itself is what the man was arrested for. Whether creating, as opposed to distributing, deepfakes is an offence is precisely the question a reader would need answered, and this piece, with the statute quoted in front of it, blurs the line instead of drawing it. (We cannot tell from this material whether a creation offence exists on the statute book; the point is that neither can the article’s reader.)

The verbs that did it

Orwell’s objection to the passive voice was not stylistic. A sentence that cannot name its actor cannot hold one to account. Watch the agentless passive evaporate the actors:

The cumulative effect is that regulation appears as a natural process rather than a political choice. Somebody chose that package of measures; somebody’s MPs pushed; somebody counted three million images. In this construction all of them melt into the general weather of concern, and the only actors left standing are the victim, the offender, and Elon Musk.

There is even a sentence where grammar and ideology cooperate: “The Online Safety Act… was later amended the legislation to cover AI-generated intimate images” [1]. The sentence is garbled, with no subject capable of amending anything, and the garble performs the same deletion the passives do. Who amended the Act, when, and after whose campaign? The article’s own syntax answers: don’t ask.

The escalator of intimacy

The Huxleyan half of the problem is tonal. The piece opens with something genuinely specific: a named force (Thames Valley Police), a named victim, a cited statute, a dated arrest [1]. Then it swells. We get “deep distress” and “mortifying” from Dorries [1]. We get “disturbingly realistic”, attributed to “sources” who told the Daily Mail [1], which means GB News is relaying another outlet’s anonymous sources: two layers of removal for the most vivid evaluative phrase in the piece. We get Jess Asato’s fake video “of her being drugged in preparation for sexual assault”, “an image of her in a bikini and her being pregnant in a kitchen” [1]. We get predators creating “nudified” images of children using “family photos taken from social media” [1]. Each detail is more intimate than the last. This is a catalogue in the Brave New World sense: not falsehood, but sensation operating as a substitute for structure. The reader is moved through a gallery of horrors and arrives at the end knowing exactly how to feel and considerably less about how the law works.

A fairness note, because it matters: the arrest, the statute, the Asato suit under the Data Protection Act, and the police statement are all specific and attributed [1]. The critique here is of the frame built on top of the facts, not the facts.

The irony the article declines to touch

The piece notes twice that Dorries introduced the Online Safety Act as Culture Secretary [1], and once that she “joined Reform in 2025” [1]. The lawgiver-becomes-victim arc is deployed as narrative spice, and it is irresistible spice, but the obvious question it raises goes unasked: what does the Act she introduced actually do about this? Part of the answer is sitting on the same page. GB News itself carries the line “Ofcom launches investigation against chatbot Grok over allegations of breaching the Online Safety Act” [1]. The regulator exists, the Act is in force, an investigation is underway. The body’s “mounting pressure to regulate” framing presents regulation as pending weather; the page’s own sidebar shows it as machinery already turning. The vaguer framing has the effect, whether intended or not, of making the story pure crisis and zero governance.

The same pattern repeats with the corporate concession. “X announced it would prevent users from using its Grok AI tool to generate images depicting real people in a state of undress in countries where doing so is illegal” [1]. The qualifier “in countries where doing so is illegal” is doing all the work and receives none of the attention. A jurisdiction-dependent ban is a partial ban; the article reproduces the company’s conditional without noting what it leaves uncovered. That is unexamined repetition of a corporate frame, the mildest and most common form of the disease this site documents.

What the reader is not told

Three omissions matter. First, the legal map: the article cites the sharing offence and never says what covers making, if anything does. Second, the status of the arrested man: the police quote says he “was later released under investigation” [1], a detail present inside the quotation and absent from every framing sentence around it. Third, the provenance of the numbers and the pressure: the three-million figure, the “reportedly” pushing MPs, the “seen as” commitment. None has a name attached.

And the connective tissue is the quack itself: “This comes as Labour MP Jess Asato is suing xAI” [1]. “This comes as” is duckspeak in the strict Orwellian sense, the phrase that joins an arrest, a lawsuit, a statistic, and a ban into one rolling emergency without establishing any connection between them beyond mood. It is fluency without thought. The sentence writes itself; that is the problem.