TAKE IT DOWN Act? Yes, take the act down before it's too late for online speech Federal legislation that would protect people from having explicit images of themselves posted and shared online without their consent is set to become law in the USA after passing the House on Monday. But advocacy groups warn the loosely worded fine-print will cause collateral damage to internet companies and free speech …
It is probably the most fun the politicians' staff members* get. Come on, wouldn't playing the bacronym game be a little fun if you didn't have to do it too often?
* The ones who would otherwise have to do boring work like writing and reading the tangled words of legislation so their bosses don't have to, not the ones who are preparing for their next election or their social media war. In other words, the staff who do work, not the ones who play the politics game.
Probably not at all, because these are not lawsuits. These are complaints sent to a different entity entirely, and from a court's perspective, the worst that can happen is an individual image is taken off a website you don't own. In reality, the worst that can happen is getting banned from a website because they don't want to deal with any more complaints or respond to cases where the complaints are untrue. In either example, though, it will probably not match the criteria written in anti-SLAPP laws, and you'd have to use less clear methods to try to respond to someone using these maliciously.
It's a bit of a minefield. I think the best way to think about it is that you're free to express yourself how you wish but not to get anyone else involved. For example: if I post a picture of my head pasted onto a nude bodybuilder then that's one thing; if I post the same picture but with your head pasted on then that's another. You may find it flattering, but equally you may not want to be seen as a nude bodybuilder (or even a clothed one). By adding your face to the picture without permission, I'm violating your right to express yourself how you wish by imposing my own wishes upon you.
Maybe we could use the law to remove any and all displays of tRump. I mean, after all, that face, with the puckered lips and all, is beyond pornographic.
And as far as ,"Nobody gets treated worse, blah, blah, blah, whine, cry, whimper", seems to me that one of his predecessors said something about heat, and a kitchen, that our current Resident might want to consider.
Or not, Mr. Thin Skin. We'll be watching for abuse, and when it happens, we'll get somebody to put yet another injunction against the Crybaby-In-Chief, and we'll see how that goes...
The bill is likely to be challenge in court and it seems it does not go into force for another year if i'm reading this right?
A) ESTABLISHMENT .—Not later than year after the date of enactment of this Act, covered platform shall establish a process whereby an identifiable individual (or an au- thorized person acting on behalf of such indi- vidual)
https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/s146/BILLS-119s146es.pdf
Also I heard the FTC needs to make guidelines but its a mess right now.
I also understand there is a sense of hopelessness everywhere right now but I don't agree with people saying we should act like courts don't matter anymore and Trump can do what he wants because this hurts and undermines the fights against bills and laws like this. We need to keep supporting lawyers and groups who are trying to fix this instead of telling them there actions do not matter.
I don't think that means what you think it does. It doesn't mean the law doesn't have force until a year has passed, but that it is fully operational exactly one year after it has. Until then, social media can probably use the "still working on it" excuse for making the process more complicated and not immediately hopping to taking down the things they're told about, but they're still supposed to and can likely be pursued if they don't.
I'd read it as saying that platforms have at most a year to implement it but nothing to say it can't be done in less than that. So if Trump is so keen Truth Social should be up and running with it PDQ. And maybe X so as to oblige his wishes. So they should be open for takedown requests Real Soon Now.
technically truetype fonts are vector IMAGES and come under this legislation.
So you can file endless take downs against the Whitehouse itself, with no punishment.
The definition of 'sexual imagery' is also left upto the complainant....so if you say you find EVERY image of trump sexy (apart from needing some sort of mental health intervention) you can request the images be taken down. And KEEP suggesting endlessly.
There's no punishment for a fake takedown, NOR is there any blockage to using a bot to search the entire internet, AI analyze the images and send a removal request!
Hell if you're into colors, you could say a plain white background arouses you and therefore must be changed! Still comes under 'images' as its an image constructed as a bitmap on screen.
Across the pond, the UK government is planning to introduce legislation prohibiting making/distributing sexually explicit 'deepfakes' of people, usually women, as a means to harass victims. That's an extension of the 'revenge porn' idea when conventional photographs taken by agreement in intimate settings are released to other people by, for example, an aggrieved ex-lover. However, the sudden rise in popularity of AI image creation/modification models, easily deployed in (or online from) domestic settings, has spewed forth worries becoming as intense as when Internet-borne child pornography got attention.
Now there is broadening on three fronts. There is AI revenge porn among adults, there are schoolchildren, mostly male, who 'nudify' images of female classmates and maliciously circulate them among other pupils via mobile phones, and there are realistic (or anime) indecent images of fantasised children (i.e. children with no doppelgänger in the real world). Atop this, is an additional worry, one as yet not headline material, over deep-faking technology being applied to 'important' people such as government ministers, 'royals', members of the Lords, and 'celebrities'.
These matters merit concern. However, doubtlessly, they will be 'talked up' into the latest of the series of national panics besetting the polity over the last three decades; perhaps a convenient distraction from concerns over 'austerity' imposed in preparation for defence against invasion from Russia.
There is stated intent to meet out severe penalties on people creating/distributing, the wherewithal to engage in unacceptable fakery, on people in simple possession of the software, and on people trying to possess copies of the end results.
We may anticipate a dog's breakfast of legislation. It will arise from almost every member of the legislature being anxious to be seen/heard to condemn the wrongs and put in their pennyworth of 'catch all' detail into the Bill. Instead of a stepwise approach to legislating - i.e. wait and see the impact of major each step, amend later, before continuing - an 'all singing, all dancing' deadweight, of law will be foisted upon us. The police and prosecution service, will be left to make sense of the new law; their members must somehow shoehorn its demands into an already huge body of priorities matched by inadequate resources. Magistrates, Crown Court Judges, and appeal courts, will be obliged to make sense out of a morass of pious wishes, and to figure out where among it lie priorities feasible to match. The police and the courts must determine the nature of victimhood deemed unquestionably worthy of attention.
I don't think it's by accident. This is to be used as lawfare to attack and imprison dissent. As usual the laws will be poorly formed to allow use beyond the claimed intent. We are heading for a police state where people are always breaking some law or other. Combine with centralised digital currency, id and geo-fencing (cctv facial recog) and you have your science fiction dystopian world. The people who control the systems will choose who lives, who dies and who is favoured or not. Don't do what you are told and your money (and food) are gone. Look at what Canada did to the Trucker's protest and now they have a smarter meglomaniac and tyrant elected!
All governments are doing it. They are directly or indirectly taking control of the internet. Game over for web 2.0.
Historical note. When some biting political satire hit the British stage, some by Henry Fielding, the British government responded with the Theatrical Licensing Act. It initiated state censorship of British drama from 1737 until 1968. So don't expect us to get our internet back any time soon.
Hopefully distributed alternatives to website based services will be launched and spread virally (no doubt condemned as 'enemies of the state'). Governments consider themselves to be the farmers and us to be the livestock. Wherever you live, your government is likely to be your enemy, because in most cases, it will do more damage to your day to day life than anyone else. You can best spot the flaw in 'democracy' when all the major parties vote together to screw you over.
@Long John Silver
As a UK resident I notice near continual media reports of pervs who have huge amounts of kiddie porn imagery but are not jailed.
So, I would imagine these new rules will be fairly pointless with current UK sentencing regime.
Though I imagine if your deep-fake targets a royal or MP then you probably will be in trouble - cant have the serfs belittling their betters can we.
Like most UK laws, the application will likely be selective
This is not a Rep/Dem or a Labour/Conservative thing, it's a common element amongst most 1st world governments.
I can understand that there is need for some online regulation but most of the proposals appear to push the limits to an unreasonable level.
We need laws that work for us, not that will eventually work against us.
I suspect if you aggregated all the coordinated attacks from far-right media on the various targets du jour, you would find trump's targets get treated worse than trump does online. Especially if you take truth into account.
If you want to talk about in real life there is no doubt that trump's targets are getting treated much worse, and his favorite targets seem to be those least able to defend themselves.
"I voted against making child murder illegal because it risked putting us on a slippery slope".
I have never had any truck with the "slippery slope" argument, which only seems to come from those who wish to allow whatever is proposed to be restricted, banned or criminalised.
If a proposal is bad then don't vote for it for being bad. Ideally work to make it better before it goes to a vote. If its scope is too wide then work to get it narrowed.
Every law or regulation introduced is a potential slippery slope You can deal with attempts to extend scope as and when they arise. Otherwise you have to vote against any and every change lest worst fears are realised. And that's ridiculous.
"Every law or regulation introduced is a potential slippery slope You can deal with attempts to extend scope as and when they arise."
The problem is that if a law doesn't have any limits on how it is used then when voting for or against it's introduction you don't have to just think about how the proposer is saying it is to be used but also how a malicious player COULD use that very same law within the limits of how it is written. It's very fine if the currently proposed use of said law is all on the straight and level, but if the law contains no guardrails and a precipitous cliff of potential misuse then you really DO have to consider voting against it for the lack of guardrails on keeping anyone using that law on the straight and level. If there is no limits on how a law might be misapplied there will be no option to vote on preventing future misuse. The law will simply get applied according to the new requirement "within the limits of the law".
We're seeing a live example of what happens when people decide they get to interpret how laws should be applied in the US and the results aren't exactly pretty.
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