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Congress Passed a Sweeping Free-Speech Crackdown—and No One’s Talking About It
The TAKE IT DOWN Act passed with bipartisan support and glowing coverage. Experts warn that it threatens the very users it claims to protect.
(Jezebel and Wired were perhaps the only publications to point out in both a headline and subhead that the law merely “ claims to offer victims greater protections ” and that “ free speech advocates warn it could be weaponized to fuel censorship.”) Rarer still, with the exception of sites like the Verge, has there been any acknowledgment of Trump’s own stated motivation for passing the act, as he’d underlined in a joint address to Congress in March: “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.” The Center for Democracy and Technology, a signatory to the letter, later noted in a follow-up statement that the powers granted to the FTC in enforcing such a vague law could lead to politically motivated attacks, undermining progress in tackling actual nonconsensual imagery. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick wrote last month that TAKE IT DOWN is “so badly designed that the people it’s meant to help oppose it,” pointing to public statements from the advocacy group Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, “whose entire existence is based on representing the interests of victims” of nonconsensual intimate imagery.
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