Stolen Faces, Erased Histories: Melbourne Communities Speak Out on Duplicate Image Replacement

Their faces appear on websites they've never visited, promoting services they've never used. The practice of duplicate image replacement — where authentic photographs of real people are scraped from social media or community publications, then substituted into unrelated digital content — is quietly devastating lives across Melbourne's western and northern suburbs.

The issue has sharpened in urgency this year as generative AI tools have made image manipulation faster and cheaper than ever. Community legal centres and multicultural advocacy groups say the volume of complaints has risen sharply since late 2025, with residents from Footscray, Flemington and Sunshine reporting their likenesses used without consent in everything from commercial advertising to disinformation campaigns targeting migrant communities.

A Problem With Specific Costs

The Western Community Legal Centre, which operates out of Footscray and serves clients across Melbourne's inner west, began tracking image misuse complaints formally in January 2026. Staff there describe a pattern: a person's photograph — often pulled from a Facebook profile or a community newsletter — appears in content that misrepresents their identity, profession or beliefs. Removing it requires navigating platform takedown processes that can take weeks and offer no guarantee of success.

The eSafety Commissioner's office, based in Sydney but handling Victorian complaints, accepts image-based abuse reports under the Online Safety Act 2021. That legislation gives the Commissioner powers to issue removal notices to platforms, but critics within Victoria's community legal sector say the Act's definitions were written with intimate-image abuse primarily in mind, leaving a gap for cases involving non-sexual duplicate image use.

At the Flemington Community Centre on Racecourse Road, staff have been fielding calls from residents whose photos appeared in social media posts promoting unlicensed financial services. The centre has no dedicated digital rights caseworker, meaning affected residents are often directed to services in the CBD — a practical barrier for those without reliable transport or English-language confidence.

The financial stakes can be real. Reputation damage from a misappropriated photograph has, in documented cases handled by community legal services, contributed to job losses and strained family relationships. Legal advice — where people can access it — typically runs between $300 and $500 per hour at private firms, making formal action out of reach for most residents in these communities.

What Residents Are Asking For

Community members who have experienced duplicate image replacement describe a common frustration: platforms respond slowly, if at all, to complaints from individuals who lack verified accounts or large follower counts. A formal report submitted to the eSafety Commissioner can take up to 72 hours to generate an initial response under current service standards, and complex cases can stretch across months.

Advocacy groups including the Ethnic Communities' Council of Victoria, headquartered on La Trobe Street in the CBD, have called on the Victorian government to fund dedicated digital rights navigators embedded within multicultural service hubs. The proposal, which has been discussed at a state level since at least 2024, would place trained caseworkers in locations like the Centre for Multicultural Youth in Carlton and community hubs in Dandenong, where populations with lower digital literacy are most vulnerable to image misuse.

The Victorian government has not yet committed funding to the navigator model specifically, though its broader Digital Inclusion strategy — updated in early 2026 — names culturally and linguistically diverse communities as a priority cohort.

For now, the practical advice from community legal centres is straightforward: set social media profiles to private, reverse-image search your own photographs periodically using tools like Google Images or TinEye, and lodge complaints simultaneously with both the platform and the eSafety Commissioner rather than waiting for one process to conclude before beginning another. The Western Community Legal Centre holds free digital rights clinics on the first Thursday of each month. The next session falls on August 6.