US President Donald Trump signed into legislation laws on Monday nicknamed the Take It Down Act, which requires platforms to take away nonconsensual instances of “intimate visible depiction” inside 48 hours of receiving a request. Corporations that take longer or don’t comply in any respect might be topic to penalties of roughly $50,000 per violation.
The legislation obtained assist from tech companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft and can go into impact inside the subsequent yr. Enforcement can be left as much as the Federal Commerce Fee, which has the facility to penalize corporations for what it deems unfair and misleading enterprise practices. Different nations, together with India, have enacted comparable laws requiring swift removals of sexually specific images or deepfakes. Delays can result in content material spreading uncontrollably throughout the online; Microsoft, for instance, took months to behave in a single high-profile case.
However free speech advocates are involved {that a} lack of guardrails within the Take It Down Act might permit unhealthy actors to weaponize the coverage to pressure tech corporations to unjustly censor on-line content material. The brand new legislation is modeled on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires web service suppliers to expeditiously take away materials that somebody claims is infringing on their copyright. Corporations may be held financially answerable for ignoring legitimate requests, which has motivated many companies to err on the aspect of warning and preemptively take away content material earlier than a copyright dispute has been resolved.
For years, fraudsters have abused the DMCA takedown process to get content material censored for causes which have nothing to do with copyright infringements. In some circumstances, the data is unflattering or belongs to business opponents that they wish to hurt. The DMCA does embrace provisions that permit fraudsters to be held financially liable after they make false claims. Final yr, for instance, Google secured a default judgment in opposition to two people accused of orchestrating a scheme to suppress opponents within the T-shirt business by submitting frivolous requests to take away a whole bunch of hundreds of search outcomes.
Fraudsters who could have feared the penalties of abusing DMCA might discover Take It Down a much less dangerous pathway. The Take It Down Act doesn’t embrace a strong deterrence provision, requiring solely that takedown requestors train “good religion,” with out specifying penalties for performing in unhealthy religion. Not like the DMCA, the brand new legislation additionally doesn’t define an appeals course of for alleged perpetrators to problem what they think about inaccurate removals. Critics of the regulation say it ought to have exempted sure content material, together with materials that may be seen as being within the public’s curiosity to stay on-line.
One other concern is that the 48-hour deadline specified within the Take It Down Act could restrict how a lot corporations can vet requests earlier than making a call about whether or not to approve them. Free speech teams contend that might result in the erasure of content material nicely past nonconsensual “visually intimate depictions,” and invite abuse by the identical sorts of fraudsters who took benefit of the DMCA.
