Regulating Deepfake Advertisements: Consumer Protection and Platform Liability in India

The convergence of generative artificial intelligence and digital advertising has produced a new and largely unregulated harm: the deepfake advertisement, in which a synthetically generated voice, face, or likeness often of a recognizable public figure is used to endorse a product, service, or investment scheme without consent. Unlike earlier forms of misleading advertising, deepfake advertisements exploit consumer trust in a manner that traditional truth-in-advertising rules were never designed to address, while distributing primarily through social media intermediaries whose liability regime was built around user-generated rather than AI-synthesised commercial content. The paper examines whether India's consumer protection and intermediary liability framework principally the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, the Guidelines for Prevention of Misleading Advertisements and Endorsements, 2022, the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2026 adequately addresses this harm. Using a doctrinal method, this research has evaluated some of the legal provisions, rulings on the issue of personality rights, as well as the self-regulating advertising norms, juxtaposing them against EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act and the FTC rule of 2024, which prohibits fake and AI-generated endorsements. Drawing on empirical data on deepfake-enabled financial fraud in India, the study finds that existing protections are fragmented, reactive, and calibrated to penalties disproportionately low relative to the scale of consumer harm, and that platform due-diligence obligations remain insufficiently tailored to paid commercial content. It recommends a statutorily defined category of “deepfake advertisement” as an unfair trade practice, turnover-linked penalties, mandatory advertiser verification for financial and health-related promotions, and coordinated enforcement among the Central Consumer Protection Authority, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and sectoral regulators.