Likely wearisome for victims, the law won’t be widely enforced for about a year, while any revenge porn already online continues spreading. Perhaps most frustrating, once the law kicks in, victims will still need to police their own revenge porn online. And the 48-hour window leaves time for content to be downloaded and reposted, leaving them vulnerable on any unmonitored platforms.
Some victims are already tired of fighting this fight. Last July, when Google started downranking deepfake porn apps to make AI-generated NCII less discoverable, one deepfake victim, Sabrina Javellana, told The New York Times that she spent months reporting harmful content on various platforms online. And that didn’t stop the fake images from spreading. Joe Morelle, a Democratic US representative who has talked to victims of deepfake porn and sponsored laws to help them, agreed that “these images live forever.”
“It just never ends,” Javellana said. “I just have to accept it.”
Andrea Powell—director of Alecto AI, an app founded by a revenge porn survivor that helps victims remove NCII online—warned on a 2024 panel that Ars attended that requiring victims to track down “their own imagery [and submit] multiple claims across different platforms [increases] their sense of isolation, shame, and fear.”
While the Take It Down Act seems flawed, passing a federal law imposing penalties for allowing deepfake porn posts could serve as a deterrent for bad actors or possibly spark a culture shift by making it clear that posting AI-generated NCII is harmful.
Victims have long suggested that consistency is key to keeping revenge porn offline, and the Take It Down Act certainly offers that, creating a moderately delayed delete button on every major platform.
Although it seems clear that the Take It Down Act will surely make it easier than ever to report NCII, whether the law will effectively reduce the spread of NCII online is an unknown and will likely hinge on the 48-hour timeline overcoming criticisms.
