Ellis Barry woke up one day her freshman year of high school to find fake intimate photos of herself spread across Snapchat. It took months, dozens of requests and a call from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for the photos to finally be released.
This may soon change.
On Tuesday, Cruz and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) introduced the Take It Down Act, which would require websites to take down deepfake revenge porn within 48 hours.
“If you don’t happen to be in a situation where a sitting member of Congress intervenes on your behalf, you’re going to have a closed door and a stone wall,” Cruz said at Tuesday’s press conference. “That’s not fair and it’s not right. It should not take the intervention of an elected member of Congress to have these despicable lies removed from Snapchat.”
At a press conference on Tuesday, Barry, his mother Anna McAdams; Dorota Mani, mother of another victim of deepfake pornography; and leaders of three organizations focused on sexual violence explained the importance of passing this bill alongside Cruz and Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.).
“It took eight and a half months for these photos to be taken down because Snapchat didn’t care,” McAdams said. “This project will give us a voice we didn’t have.”
According to an analysis by Wired, 244,625 deepfake porn videos were loaded for some of the biggest sites on the Internet over the past seven years.
According to a 2019 Report96% of deepfakes were non-consensual sexual deepfakes, of which 99% featured women.
Almost every state has a law that protects people against revenge porn, and 20 states already have laws that explicitly cover AI-generated deepfakes.
In 2022, Congress passed legislation that created a civil cause of action for victims to sue individuals who posted revenge porn. However, this group of senators believes that civil action does not go far enough, with their statement announcing the bill calling civil action “time-consuming, expensive” and “impractical”.
The bill is supported by more than 30 interest groups, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, SAG-AFTRA, the National Organization for Women, and IBM. It is co-sponsored by 11 other senators, in addition to Cruz and Klobuchar.
During the press conference, Stefan Turkheimer, vice president of public policy at the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, spoke about a recent case in which a U.S. Navy captain created a fake Facebook page for an ex-girlfriend, befriending most of her friends and colleagues and later posting intimate photos of her. Facebook rejected more than 100 requests to take down the page because it said it looked like an authentic page.
“When Facebook comes here and says they’re working on the problem,” he said, “note that all of their economic incentives are to do absolutely nothing, and that changes when this bill passes. I want to thank Senator Cruz and Senator Klobuchar for making a difference.”
This bill is one of three in the Senate related to fake revenge porn. Cruz said his project will “complement these projects” and “fill gaps.” He added that he believes his bill will pass the Senate by the end of the year and hopes to present it soon for a Commerce Committee hearing. Cruz is the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee.
“I don’t think there’s an ideological divide in this,” Cruz told The Hill. “I don’t think there is a partisan divide. Being here today. I don’t know if the big tech companies will lobby against this or not. Hope not. I hope they recognize that this is an eminently common sense step and, frankly, it is what they should have done a long time ago.”
A bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Senators Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced a bill last week that would make it a crime to intentionally share deepfake pornographic images and videos without consent. Criminal penalties would include a fine and up to two years in prison, while civil penalties could be up to $150,000 in fines.
Earlier this year, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) introduced a bipartisan bill that would allow victims of nonconsensual deepfakes to sue people who created, distributed, maintained, or possessed the image.
Durbin tried to get a plenary vote on his bill last week, but Lummis blocked the bill, saying it was “far-reaching” and would “stifle American technological innovation.”
During Tuesday’s press conference, Lummis said he put this bill on hold because he hoped to work with Durbin on “adapting the language” to make the bill as “targeted” as possible.
Durbin’s bill was co-sponsored by Klobuchar and Sens. Lindsey Graham (R.S.C.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Angus King (I-Maine), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Chuck Schumer (D.N.Y.).
The Take It Down Act introduced Tuesday is co-sponsored by Lummis and Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Shelley Moore Capito (RW.Va.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Ted Budd (RN.C.), Laphonza Butler (D-Calif.), Todd Young (R- Ind.), Joe Manchin (IW.Va.), John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), and Martin Heinrich (DN.M.).
This story was first posted at 11:30 a.m.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
