The House of Representatives yesterday passed the "Take It Down" act, which requires that websites and platforms remove "non consensual intimate imagery" within 48 hours when flagged. Though the intent is to protect victims of revenge porn or AI fakery, the material is ill-defined and the bill contains no safeguards against frivolous or malicious takedown demands. Moreover, politicians and other powerful figures—including Donald Trump—have openly said they intend to use the law to censor critics.
Congress is using the wrong approach to helping people whose intimate images are shared without their consent. TAKE IT DOWN pressures platforms to actively monitor speech, including speech that is presently encrypted. The law thus presents a huge threat to security and privacy online. While the bill is meant to address a serious problem, good intentions alone are not enough to make good policy. Lawmakers should be strengthening and enforcing existing legal protections for victims, rather than inventing new takedown regimes that are ripe for abuse.
Here's what the president had to say about the bill: "The Senate just passed the Take It Down Act…. Once it passes the House, I look forward to signing that bill into law. And I'm going to use that bill for myself too if you don't mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody."
The censorship mechanism is simple: it's cheap to demand a takedown but expensive to refuse, no matter how obviously false or frivolous the demand. Anyone familiar with YouTube's cottage industry of takedown scams or other forms of IP trolling knows exactly how this will work in practice.
Mike Masnick puts it in perspective: "The bill is so bad that even the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, whose entire existence is based on representing the interests of victims of NCII and passing bills similar to the Take It Down Act, has come out with a statement saying that, while it supports laws to address such imagery, it cannot support this bill due to its many, many inherent problems."
