Non-Consensual Content in 2026: The Data Behind the Problem

A note on these numbers

These figures come from named organizations and government agencies, cited inline, not from unsourced "statistics" roundups. Some come from different years — we say so where it matters. We left out several widely-repeated numbers about creator platforms specifically because we couldn't trace them to a real survey or methodology, only to sites recycling each other's claims.

How common is this, really?

The most-cited baseline comes from the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI): roughly 1 in 12 U.S. adult social media users has been a victim of non-consensual pornography. In CCRI's survey research, 90% of victims were women, and perpetrators were most often ex-partners (57%) or acquaintances such as ex-friends (23%). Some groups face disproportionately higher rates — 17.9% of bisexual women reported being targeted, the highest of any group CCRI has surveyed.

The human cost, not just the headline number

CCRI's research also tracked what happens after: 93% of victims reported significant emotional distress, and 51% said they'd contemplated suicide. On the practical side, 6% reported losing a job or being expelled from school because of it, and 13% reported difficulty getting hired or admitted somewhere afterward. This is why we treat this as a safety issue as much as a content one — see our guide on what to do first.

Sextortion, in the FBI's own numbers

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received more than 75,000 sextortion complaints in its 2025 Annual Report — a category within the 1,008,597 total complaints IC3 logged that year, the first time its count has passed one million in its 25-year history. 17.6% of sextortion complaints involved victims under 20, accounting for roughly 11,000 reports, and over 5,700 cases were serious enough to refer to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Deepfakes: still overwhelmingly non-consensual imagery

The landmark data point here is older but still the most rigorously sourced: a 2019 study by Sensity (then called Deeptrace) found that 96% of deepfake videos found online were pornographic, and that every identified target was a woman — about a third of them from non-Western backgrounds. The top four dedicated deepfake-pornography sites had drawn more than 134 million combined views at the time. Newer volume estimates circulate widely, but we couldn't verify a comparably rigorous, up-to-date source for them — the underlying pattern this 2019 study identified is what current law is now explicitly responding to.

How the law has responded

All 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. now have some legal protection against non-consensual intimate imagery, and 46 states specifically extend that to AI-generated or manipulated deepfakes as of early 2026. At the federal level, the Take It Down Act — signed into law in 2025 — criminalizes publishing NCII with penalties of up to two years in prison, and requires platforms to remove reported content within 48 hours and make reasonable efforts to delete copies elsewhere on their service. More on how these frameworks fit together in our law glossary and guide to NCII-specific laws.

The scale of the wider copyright removal system

For context on how much removal infrastructure already exists — not specific to intimate content, but the DMCA system a lot of takedowns rely on — Google's own Transparency Report shows more than 6 million distinct domains have had URLs requested for delisting from Search over the life of the program, submitted by over 886,700 copyright owners and 1.24 million reporting organizations acting on their behalf. It's a copyright-wide figure, not an NCII one, but it shows the request-and-removal pipeline behind our DMCA takedown guide operates at a genuinely massive scale — and still has no fixed response deadline, unlike the newer NCII-specific laws above.

The free tools already fighting back

StopNCII.org, the free hash-matching tool, had logged more than 434,000 submitted image hashes across over 182,000 cases as of its most recently published figures, and was named one of just 90 "Champion" initiatives out of 360 global nominees in June 2026. Microsoft expanded its use of StopNCII's hash database across Teams Free, OneDrive, and Xbox that same May. In the UK, the Revenge Porn Helpline reports a removal rate above 90% across more than 300,000 individual images taken down.

What this data is useful for

If you're a creator trying to understand your own situation, the takeaway is simple: this happens at scale, to a lot of people, and the legal tools to respond have gotten meaningfully stronger in the last two years. Our DMCA takedown guide and leaving the industry guide cover the practical side.

If you're a journalist or researcher looking for context, sourcing, or comment on any of this, message us on Telegram — no obligation to use our service, we're glad to talk through what we're seeing.