\n<\/p>\n
Privacy and digital rights advocates are raising alarms over a law that many would expect them to cheer: a federal crackdown on revenge porn and AI-generated deepfakes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The newly signed Take It Down Act<\/a> makes it illegal to publish nonconsensual explicit images \u2014 real or AI-generated \u2014 and gives platforms just 48 hours to comply with a victim\u2019s takedown request or face liability. While widely praised as a long-overdue win for victims, experts have also warned its vague language, lax standards for verifying claims, and tight compliance window could pave the way for overreach, censorship of legitimate content, and even surveillance.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cContent moderation at scale is widely problematic and always ends up with important and necessary speech being censored,\u201d India McKinney, director of federal affairs at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n Online platforms have one year to establish a process for removing nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII). While the law requires takedown requests come from victims or their representatives, it only asks for a physical or electronic signature \u2014 no photo ID or other form of verification is needed. That likely aims to reduce barriers for victims, but it could create an opportunity for abuse.<\/p>\n \u201cI really want to be wrong about this, but I think there are going to be more requests to take down images depicting queer and trans people in relationships, and even more than that, I think it\u2019s gonna be consensual porn,\u201d McKinney said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), a co-sponsor of the Take It Down Act, also sponsored the Kids Online Safety Act<\/a> which puts the onus on platforms to protect children from harmful content online. Blackburn has said she believes content related to transgender people<\/a> is harmful to kids.\u00a0Similarly, the Heritage Foundation \u2014 the conservative think tank behind Project 2025 \u2014 has also said<\/a> that \u201ckeeping trans content away from children is protecting kids.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Because of the liability that platforms face if they don\u2019t take down an image within 48 hours of receiving a request, \u201cthe default is going to be that they just take it down without doing any investigation to see if this actually is NCII or if it\u2019s another type of protected speech, or if it\u2019s even relevant to the person who\u2019s making the request,\u201d said McKinney.<\/p>\n Snapchat and Meta have both said they are supportive of the law, but neither responded to TechCrunch\u2019s requests for more information about how they\u2019ll verify whether the person requesting a takedown is a victim.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mastodon, a decentralized platform that hosts its own flagship server that others can join, told TechCrunch it would lean towards removal if it was too difficult to verify the victim.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mastodon and other decentralized platforms like Bluesky or Pixelfed may be especially vulnerable to the chilling effect of the 48-hour takedown rule. These networks rely on independently operated servers, often run by nonprofits or individuals. Under the law, the FTC can treat any platform that doesn\u2019t \u201creasonably comply\u201d with takedown demands as committing an \u201cunfair or deceptive act or practice\u201d \u2013 even if the host isn\u2019t a commercial entity.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is troubling on its face, but it is particularly so at a moment when the chair of the FTC has taken unprecedented<\/a> steps to politicize<\/a> the agency and has explicitly promised to use the power of the agency to punish platforms and services on an ideological<\/a>, as opposed to principled, basis,\u201d the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to ending revenge porn, said in a statement<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n McKinney predicts that platforms will start moderating content before it\u2019s disseminated so they have fewer problematic posts to take down in the future.\u00a0<\/p>\n Platforms are already using AI to monitor for harmful content. <\/p>\n Kevin Guo, CEO and co-founder of AI-generated content detection startup Hive<\/a>, said his company works with online platforms to detect deepfakes and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Some of Hive\u2019s customers include Reddit, Giphy, Vevo, Bluesky, and BeReal.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe were actually one of the tech companies that endorsed that bill,\u201d Guo told TechCrunch. \u201cIt\u2019ll help solve some pretty important problems and compel these platforms to adopt solutions more proactively.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Hive\u2019s model is a software-as-a-service, so the startup doesn\u2019t control how platforms use its product to flag or remove content. But Guo said many clients insert Hive\u2019s API at the point of upload to monitor before anything is sent out to the community.\u00a0<\/p>\n A Reddit spokesperson told TechCrunch the platform uses \u201csophisticated internal tools, processes, and teams to address and remove\u201d NCII. Reddit also partners with nonprofit SWGfl to deploy its StopNCII tool, which scans live traffic for matches against a database of known NCII and removes accurate matches. The company did not share how it would ensure the person requesting the takedown is the victim.\u00a0<\/p>\n McKinney warns this kind of monitoring could extend into encrypted messages in the future. While the law focuses on public or semi-public dissemination, it also requires platforms to \u201cremove and make reasonable efforts to prevent the reupload\u201d of nonconsensual intimate images. She argues this could incentivize proactive scanning of all content, even in encrypted spaces. The law doesn\u2019t include any carve outs for end-to-end encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal, or iMessage.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meta, Signal, and Apple have not responded to TechCrunch\u2019s request for more information on their plans for encrypted messaging.<\/p>\n On March 4, Trump delivered a joint address to Congress in which he praised the Take It Down Act and said he looked forward to signing it into law.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I\u2019m going to use that bill for myself, too, if you don\u2019t mind,\u201d he added. \u201cThere\u2019s nobody who gets treated worse than I do online.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n While the audience laughed at the comment, not everyone took it as a joke. Trump hasn\u2019t been shy about suppressing or retaliating against unfavorable speech, whether that\u2019s labeling mainstream media outlets \u201cenemies of the people<\/a>,\u201d barring The Associated Press<\/a> from the Oval Office despite a court order, or pulling funding<\/a> from NPR and PBS.<\/p>\nProactive monitoring<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Broader free speech implications<\/strong><\/h2>\n