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How effective will the Senate-passed bill, S. 4569, the Take It Down Act, which would criminalize the publication of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) be?

13.06.2025 10:11

How effective will the Senate-passed bill, S. 4569, the Take It Down Act, which would criminalize the publication of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) be?

You could publish the photo in a magazine. You could put it on a billboard. But you couldn't use an AI tool to generate the image—that would be a federal crime.

The TAKE IT DOWN Act is really about what its letters say:

Probably close to zero. For two reasons:

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But the part about deepfakes… it probably isn't going to fly. Not because the idea of deepfakes isn't troubling. Because of the way the law is actually written.

What the feds (Cruz is the sole sponsor, I see) could have done? If they probably would have focused more on the whole take-down notice provisions and the rights of privacy and publicity, it would probably be stronger as a whole.

“Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act”

Do opposites attract? How often do you see weird couples like a guy/girl dating someone who is boring with no sense of humor ?

It just doesn't… do much in terms of the criminalization. Most people that experience problems with this, federal law enforcement is going to do nothing for them. The feds just don’t have the resources.

So, simply publishing intimate photos is a federal crime. Under certain conditions. There's a takedown procedure there, and I don't really see that as being an issue. States have made publishing intimate images crimes and torts. But because computer networks fluidly crossed state boundaries, that gets complicated and messy to try to enforce to do what many victims really want—remove offending images. So, a federal takedown procedure is probably a good idea to facilitate that.

It will likely be held unconstitutional.

Why are there posts saying the T in LGBT should be dropped? With what is happening in the US and beyond against the trans community cause for concern that if this is accepted could it be deemed acceptable to start on the LGB community again?

To be clear, the bill is not about “non-consensual intimate imagery”. At least, not what you might think what that phrase means. It is a phrase defined in the bill—which I'll come back to in a moment.

Don't get me wrong. Given what most of the bill covers, large sections of it will still be enforceable. But they're also a little vague. And that's going to cause some issues. People that create those kinds of images to harass or embarrass or humiliate or whatever? I don't feel bad for them in the slightest, and this law would probably punish them successfully.

Eye-rolling, right?

Why do untreated borderlines always blame their partners when they actually think they are normal?

The phrase “non-consensual intimate imagery” is targeted toward using AI to create and publish lewd imagery of a real person. (Though there is a section in the act that really just covers intimate images that aren't deepfakes at all.)

For example, it would become a criminal act to publish a photo like this—unredacted.

So in effect, there's going to be a First Amendment problem on the scope of what is covered. It has the potential to criminalize otherwise protected speech, only because it’s on a computer network. And that’s going to be a big problem.

Why do I sweat so much after shower?

However, I'm a little bit more worried about how the vagueness is going to be used offensively to punish conduct that isn't really intended to be covered by this. I can think of a few strategic ways it could be used to threaten people for relatively benign conduct.