Rashmika Mandanna's Deepfake Video Is 'Insulting and Infuriating', Telangana Minister Demands Action

Telangana Minister KT Rama Rao has expressed disappointment with Rashmika Mandanna’s viral deepfake video. The minister was speaking at the India Today Telangana Roundtable on Wednesday when he called the video ‘insulting and infuriating’. He further demanded legislation to be brought into the parliament to take stern action against those who create such clips.

“I saw it in the news about what happened to Rashmika Mandanna. It’s truly atrocious to demean her and to go after someone like her who’s a celebrity. It’s deeply insulting and infuriating. Whatever regulations are to be brought, whatever stringent measures are to be brought in the form of legislation, we’re happy to bring it in our state and hopefully, the Government of India will also play along and do the same,” KTR said.

For the unversed, a morphed video of Rashmika Mandanna recently went viral on social media. In the clip, the woman with Rashmika’s face was seen getting into a lift, wearing a fitted outfit. However, it was soon clarified that the viral clip was deepfake. It grabbed everyone’s attention after superstar Amitabh Bachchan also took to the microblogging site X and demanded legal action.

Later, Rashmika Mandanna also reacted to it and called it ‘scary’. “I feel really hurt to share this and have to talk about the deepfake video of me being spread online. Something like this is honestly, extremely scary not only for me, but also for each one of us who today is vulnerable to so much harm because of how technology is being misused. Today, as a woman and as an actor, I am thankful for my family, friends and well wishers who are my protection and support system. But if this happened to me when I was in school or college, I genuinely can’t imagine how could I ever tackle this. We need to address this as a community and with urgency before more of us are affected by such identity theft,” she wrote on her Instagram stories.

So far, several celebrities including Vijay Deverakonda, Naga Chaitanya and Mrunal Thakur among others have also expressed concern over the viral video.