Trump is endorsing the "Take it down" act - and wants to abuse it for selfish reasons because he is the biggest victim of all:
“And I’m going to use that bill for myself too, if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”
This is, of course, exactly what we (and many others) warned about in December when discussing the
Take It Down Act. The bill aims to address a legitimate problem — non-consensual intimate imagery — but does so with a censorship mechanism so obviously prone to abuse that the president couldn’t even wait until it passed to announce his plans to misuse it.
And Congress laughed. Literally.
Let’s talk about non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) for a minute. (People used to call it “revenge porn,” but that’s a terrible name — it’s not porn, it’s abuse.) The tech industry, after a fairly slow start, has actually been reasonably good more recently at trying to address this problem. You’ve got NCMEC’s
Take It Down system helping kids get abusive images removed. You’ve got
StopNCII.org doing clever things with hashes that let platforms identify and remove bad content without anyone having to look at it. These aren’t perfect solutions, but they show what happens when smart people try to solve hard problems thoughtfully.
But Congress (specifically Senators Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar) looked at all this work and said “nah, let’s just make websites legally liable if they don’t take down anything someone claims is NCII within 48 hours.” It’s the “nerd harder or we fine you” approach to tech regulations.
You can’t just write a law that says “take down the bad stuff.” I mean, you can, but it will be a disaster. You have to think about how people might abuse it. The DMCA’s notice-and-takedown system for copyright at least tried to include some safeguards — there’s a counternotice process, there are (theoretical) penalties for false notices. But TAKE IT DOWN? Nothing. Zero. Nada.
We already see
thousands of bogus DMCA notices attempting to remove content with no basis in the law, even with those safeguards in place. What do you think will happen with a law that has no safeguards at all? (Spoiler alert: The president just told us exactly what will happen.)
Even given the seriousness of the topic, and the president’s support, you might think that Congress would care about the fact that the bill almost certainly violates the First Amendment, and thus would stand a high likelihood of being tossed out as unconstitutional. CDT
tried to warn them, explaining that forcing websites to take down content without any court review creates some thorny constitutional problems. (Who knew that requiring private companies to censor speech based on unverified complaints might raise First Amendment concerns? Well, everyone who’s ever taken a constitutional law class, but apparently not Congress.)
Congress could have fixed those problems. But chose not to.
During his address to Congress this week, Donald Trump endorsed the Take It Down Act while openly declaring his plans to abuse it: “And I’m going to use that bill for myself too, if you…
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