It took skill to create a convincing Photoshop fake. It could absolutely be done, but the people who'd taken the time to develop those skills usually didn't employ them to do things like this. They'd go on to master something else, or use their skill to make money.

Creating convincing fakes has now been placed within reach of random 14-year olds, so it's not surprising that we're seeing more of it.

We can see an analogy to the legality of deepfake content itself. For now anyways, it appears that deepfake content itself is not illegal. Only the impact of distribution of it can have legal remedies (and criminal implications).

Similarly in the arena of public attention, only the impact of an "event" has value. The combination of Swift as the target, and internet punching bag Twitter/X is a surefire way to ignite a firestorm.

That said, I think prior iterations of deepfaking and fake celeb porn lacked the degree of exposure to really force a proper discussion of what role platforms should actually play. Like, when it was just a bunch of people on 4chan photoshopping faces around, and you had to go to like 3rd page of search results to find it, the impact was clearly low, and no one cared to really think through what should happen.

Now we have a situation which is acting like a forcing function. What are the differences (if any) do deepfake porn have with photoshops (or just drawings...). What is the quality of them that substantiates a different response (if any?). If there aren't, then maybe we got our initial response to photoshopped porn wrong (and got away with it because the scale didn't matter), and we need to revisit.

I’m fairly confident people have always taken issue to their likeness being manipulated into compromising and inappropriate images.

Since before computers and photographs.

Because now everyone with half a brain can create hundreds of these images in minutes, whereas previously it took substantial time investment and skill.