FTC Warns Big Tech About Take it Down
The Take it Down Act (TIDA) is a law passed last year requires big tech to do two things:
- Give people an easy way to request materials be taken down and
- Take it down within 48 hours.
Failure to do so risks a $53,088 fine per violation.
So, what do they have to take down?
What they have to take down is non-consensual “intimate” images (i.e. porn, nudes, deep fakes, etc.).
The FTC began enforcing the act on Tuesday and last week sent letters to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Automatic, Bumble, Discord, Match, Meta, Microsoft, Pinterest, Reddit, SmugMug, Snapchat, TikTok and X.
Who has to comply are companies (apps, websites and online services) that allow user-generated content or who host intimate images without consent.
The requirement is for an EASY way for people to tell the sites to take down the images.
The FTC said that companies should begin using hashing to ensure duplicates are taken down together. This may not be as easy as it sounds. One statistic says that users post 500,000 comments a minute to Facebook alone. That is 700 million a day.
The FTC also suggested shared the hashes with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and StopNII (non-consensual intimate images). I am not sure that the law requires that last part.
Given the lack of love between this administration and Silicon Valley, enforcement COULD be swift, but we will have to wait and see.
But, until the companies make it easy to make a request, they are in violation.
One of the challenges of this law is the abuse of it. Malicious users could flood the platforms with FALSE take down requests causing totally legitimate content to disappear. It is not clear how the platforms will deal with that.
Credit: The Record
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