The Take It Down Act is heading to President Donald Trump’s desk after the House voted 409-2 to cross the invoice, which would require social media corporations to take down content material flagged as nonconsensual (together with AI-generated) sexual photographs. Trump has pledged to signal it.
The invoice is among the many solely items of on-line security laws to efficiently cross each chambers in years of furor over deepfakes, little one security, and different points — nevertheless it’s one which critics worry shall be used as a weapon in opposition to content material the administration or its allies dislike. It criminalizes the publication of nonconsensual intimate photographs (NCII), whether or not actual or computer-generated, and requires social media platforms to have a system to take away these photographs inside 48 hours of being flagged. In his tackle to Congress this 12 months, Trump quipped that after he signed it, “I’m going to make use of that invoice for myself too, in the event you don’t thoughts, as a result of no one will get handled worse than I do on-line, no one.”
The proliferation of AI instruments that make it simpler than ever to generate realistic-looking photographs has supercharged issues about deepfaked, damaging content material spreading via colleges and creating a brand new vector of bullying and abuse. But whereas critics say that’s an essential problem to cope with, they fear that the Take It Down Act’s method could possibly be exploited to inflict hurt in different methods.
The Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), which was created to fight image-based sexual abuse, stated that it will possibly’t cheer the Take It Down Act’s passage. “While we welcome the long-overdue federal criminalization of NDII [the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images], we remorse that it’s mixed with a takedown provision that’s extremely prone to misuse and can seemingly be counter-productive for victims,” the group writes. It fears that the invoice, which empowers the Federal Trade Commission — whose Democratic minority commissioners Trump fired in a break with a long time of Supreme Court precedent — shall be selectively enforced in a manner that finally solely props up “unscrupulous platforms.”
“Platforms that really feel assured that they’re unlikely to be focused by the FTC (for instance, platforms which are carefully aligned with the present administration) could really feel emboldened to easily ignore stories of NDII,” they write. “Platforms making an attempt to determine genuine complaints could encounter a sea of false stories that would overwhelm their efforts and jeopardize their skill to function in any respect.”
“Platforms could reply by abandoning encryption solely”
Because of the fast turnaround for platforms to take away content material flagged as nonconsensual intimate imagery, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warns that particularly smaller platforms “should comply so shortly to keep away from authorized threat that they received’t have the ability to confirm claims.” Instead, they’ll seemingly flip to flawed filters to crack down on duplicates, they write. The group additionally cautions that end-to-end encrypted companies together with personal messaging techniques and cloud storage aren’t exempted from the invoice, posing a threat to the privateness know-how. Since encrypted companies can’t monitor what their customers ship to 1 one other, the EFF asks, “How may such companies adjust to the takedown requests mandated on this invoice? Platforms could reply by abandoning encryption solely so as to have the ability to monitor content material—turning personal conversations into surveilled areas,” together with ones that abuse survivors generally flip to.
Even so, the Take It Down Act shortly garnered a large base of help. First Lady Melania Trump has turn into a number one champion of the invoice, nevertheless it’s additionally seen backing from guardian and youth advocates, in addition to some within the tech business. Google’s president of world affairs Kent Walker referred to as the passage “an enormous step towards defending people from nonconsensual specific imagery,” and Snap equally applauded the vote. Internet Works, a bunch whose members embody medium-sized corporations like Discord, Etsy, Reddit, Roblox, and others, praised the House vote, with government director Peter Chandler saying the invoice “would empower victims to take away NCII supplies from the Internet and finish the cycle of victimization by those that publish this heinous content material.”
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), one in every of two members (each Republican) who voted in opposition to the invoice, wrote on X that he couldn’t help it as a result of “I really feel this can be a slippery slope, ripe for abuse, with unintended penalties.”
