The German government just drafted a law that would make it a criminal offense, punishable by up to two years in prison, to create or share AI-generated content that “appears to reflect an actual event in relation to another person” and is “likely to cause significant damage to that person’s reputation.”
There’s no requirement that the content be pornographic, violent, or defamatory in the traditional legal sense. The government gets to decide what counts as “reputation damage,” and the person who shared the meme gets a potential prison sentence.
Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig (SPD) pushed the draft legislation forward after allegations by actress Collien Fernandes against her ex-husband, Christian Ulmen, involving non-consensual deepfake pornography.
The bill that Hubig pulled out of the ministry’s drawer goes so far beyond protecting victims of sexual deepfakes that the connection feels like a pretext.
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The draft law creates three new or expanded criminal provisions. A reformulated §184k of the Criminal Code would cover non-consensual pornographic deepfakes, with penalties of up to two years in prison, but a new §201b would criminalize non-pornographic deepfakes that are “likely to cause significant damage to reputation.” And a new §202e would target unauthorized digital tracking and spying using stalkerware.
Punishing people who install hidden tracking tools on someone else’s phone without their knowledge is reasonable law enforcement. That provision, though, is covering for everything else in this bill.
Because the real problem is §201b, the provision that has nothing to do with pornography and everything to do with political speech. As criminal defense attorney Udo Vetter wrote on his law blog, the proposed §201b “punishes with up to two years’ imprisonment whoever makes accessible to a third person content created or altered by means of a computer program that gives the appearance of reflecting an actual event relating to another person and that is likely to significantly damage that person’s reputation.”
That language is broad enough to cover a satirical meme of a politician, a parody video, or a doctored image used for political commentary.
Vetter calls the bill “a Trojan horse, freshly polished.” His central observation is damning. The proposed §201b “does not require that naked people or body parts be shown or that persons be placed in sexually degrading positions. The paragraph requires no degradation, no glorification of violence, no incitement to hatred. It simply targets ‘significant reputational damage’ from a meme or video,” a standard that reaches well beyond deepfake pornography and into the core of political discourse.
The bill does include an exemption clause for satire and political art. On paper, that looks like a safeguard. Vetter argues the exemption is “structurally useless” for a central category of political satire, because the whole point of a political deepfake is that it mimics reality.
The satirical value comes from the resemblance to real events. A court ruling that a given meme qualifies as protected satire might come years later. The police raid on the meme creator’s home comes at six in the morning.
That is the chilling effect, and Vetter names it explicitly. Not the conviction. The process. “Seizure of all computers and devices, legal costs, and months of stigmatization from an ongoing criminal investigation are punishment enough,” he writes.
“Legitimate, sharp criticism falls silent out of sheer fear of repression, before any court has decided anything.” People stop making political memes not because they’re found guilty, but because they can’t afford to find out.
Germany already has direct experience with exactly this kind of abuse. The 2021 law against insults to politicians (§188 StGB) led in 2024 to a home raid on a man who had shared an ironic image montage online calling then-Economy Minister Robert Habeck a “Schwachkopf” (idiot), styled in the font of the cosmetics brand Schwarzkopf. A law designed to protect local council members from harassment was used to send police into someone’s home over a joke about a federal minister. The proposed deepfake law would give prosecutors even wider latitude.
The German Bar Association (DAV) has already said the bill “overshoots the mark.” Ali B. Norouzi, chair of the DAV’s criminal law committee, warns against a “legislative snap reaction” following “media-accompanied public outrage.”
DAV board member Niko Härting previously told LTO that the existence of gaps in criminal liability around deepfakes that would justify new legislation “must be doubted,” noting that personality rights are already protected under existing defamation statutes.
