Monday's House passed overwhelmingly bipartisan law to criminalize the inconsensual sharing of sexually explicit photos and other videos containing AI-generated images known as “deepfakes.”
A vote of 409 to 2 cleared President Trump's action. President Trump was expected to sign it soon.
The law, known as the Take it Down Act, aims to crack down on the sharing of material known as the “Revenge Porn.” Social media companies and online platforms require that such images be deleted within two days of being notified.
The measure united the parties with conservatives and the coalition with or without Liberals, and unanimously passed the Senate in February. Trump's support, who mentioned it in his joint speech to Congress last month, appears to have smoothed out the path through Congress.
Introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican Texas and Democrat Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota, is the first Internet Content Act to clear Congress since 2018, when lawmakers approved the law to combat online sex trafficking. And while focusing on vengeance porn and deepfakes, the bill is seen as an important step towards regulating internet companies that have been spared government scrutiny for decades.
The overwhelming support of the Take It Down Act highlights the rise of anger among lawmakers on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and X.
Revenge porn and deepfake affect adults and minors alike, but both were particularly powerful for teenage girls as the spread extension of the widely available “nudification” app allows boys to secretly craft and circulate sexually explicit images of female classmates.
Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, introduced her fellow bill in the House, but on Monday said the bill would stop the abuse and harassment of young girls “spread like wildfires” online.
“Using the faces, voices, similarities and more of young, vulnerable women is incredibly ill to use images to manipulate them, to force them, and publicly humiliate them for fun, just for revenge,” Salazar said.
The legislation has repeatedly made similar efforts to houses across the country. All states except South Carolina have laws that criminalize revenge porn. And at least 20 states have laws that address sexually explicit deepfakes.
The measures passed Monday are part of years of bipartisan efforts by lawmakers to address deep artisan pornography. Cruz and Klobuchar first introduced the bill last year when they passed the Senate but died in a Republican-led home. This year it was reintroduced and looked to gain momentum after gaining support from first lady Melania Trump.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a millennium Democrat from New York, also introduced legislation last year that allowed people portrayed in sexually explicit deepfakes to sue those who created and shared them. The bill has not been reintroduced this year.
Lawmakers have recently gathered around several bills aimed at protecting children online from sexual exploitation, bullying and addictive algorithms. In January 2024, chief executives of Meta, Tiktok and other tech companies testified before angry lawmakers and defended the platform.
During the hearing, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg was forced to apologise to parents who lost their children due to online harm.
Some speech advocates warn that the measure can cool free expression by saying that such laws could force the removal of legal images along with legal sexual images.
“The best intentions cannot compensate for the dangerous impact of the bill on constitutional speech and privacy online,” said Becca Branham, assistant director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy Technology, a research group.
Branham added that the Take It Down Act is “a weaponized enforcement recipe that risks durable progress in the fight against image-based sexual abuse.”
