US President Donald Trump signed into legislation laws on Monday nicknamed the Take It Down Act, which requires platforms to take away nonconsensual situations of “intimate visual depiction” inside 48 hours of receiving a request. Companies that take longer or don’t comply in any respect may very well be topic to penalties of roughly $50,000 per violation.
The legislation obtained help from tech companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft and can go into impact throughout the subsequent 12 months. Enforcement shall be left as much as the Federal Trade Commission, which has the ability to penalize corporations for what it deems unfair and misleading enterprise practices. Other international locations, together with India, have enacted related laws requiring swift removals of sexually specific pictures or deepfakes. Delays can result in content material spreading uncontrollably throughout the net; Microsoft, for instance, took months to behave in a single high-profile case.
But free speech advocates are involved {that a} lack of guardrails within the Take It Down Act might enable dangerous actors to weaponize the coverage to power tech corporations to unjustly censor on-line content material. The 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. Companies might be held financially accountable for ignoring legitimate requests, which has motivated many companies to err on the facet of warning and preemptively take away content material earlier than a copyright dispute has been resolved.
For years, fraudsters have abused the DMCA takedown course of to get content material censored for causes that don’t have anything to do with copyright infringements. In some circumstances, the data is unflattering or belongs to business rivals that they need to hurt. The DMCA does embrace provisions that enable fraudsters to be held financially liable after they make false claims. Last 12 months, for instance, Google secured a default judgment in opposition to two people accused of orchestrating a scheme to suppress rivals within the T-shirt business by submitting frivolous requests to take away a whole lot of 1000’s 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 faith,” with out specifying penalties for appearing in dangerous religion. Unlike the DMCA, the brand new legislation additionally doesn’t define an appeals course of for alleged perpetrators to problem what they contemplate 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.
Another 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 choice about whether or not to approve them. Free speech teams contend that might result in the erasure of content material effectively past nonconsensual “visually intimate depictions,” and invite abuse by the identical sorts of fraudsters who took benefit of the DMCA.
https://www.wired.com/story/take-it-down-act-law-passes/