Melania Trump takes on revenge porn and deepfakes

First Lady Melania Trump held a roundtable on Capitol Hill Monday with victims of revenge porn, deepfakes and sextortion in support of the “Take It Down Act.”

The “Take It Down Act” is a bipartisan bill cosponsored by Senators Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar that would require social-media platforms to remove any nonconsensual intimate images within forty-eight hours of a victim’s request.

While the act passed the Senate with a unanimous vote, FLOTUS hopes it will be passed with the same enthusiasm in the House before being signed into law by her husband. She called for the prioritization of “robust security measures and to uphold strict ethical standards to protect individual privacy.”

Two young women at the event spoke about their experiences as victims of pornographic deepfakes when they were both fourteen years old. Fellow classmates used AI tools to create the material and distributed it on social media sites, spreading it across their campuses and the world. The schools did little to address the issue, with Snapchat refusing to take down the photos until Cruz called the company directly.

“It should not take a sitting senator or a member of Congress to pick up the phone to get a picture down or a video down. It should be the right of every American,” Cruz said.

Breeze Liu woke up one morning to find that a sexually explicit video of herself had been posted and shared online without her permission. She shared that the technology used to create or distribute this type of content is not necessarily good or evil but instead reflects the values of those who control it. Liu called for House representatives to “build a digital future that is safe, just and worthy of the generations to come.”

However, not all victims are able to speak for themselves. State Representative Brandon Guffey of South Carolina shared the story of his son, Gavin, who was a victim of sextortion. Gavin received a request from an Instagram account suggesting they exchange nudes. An hour and forty minutes later, Gavin took his own life.

“In his mind, no one had his back, and this wasn’t talked about,” Guffey said.

Guffey said that Big Tech is the Big Tobacco of this generation. Representative María Elvira Salazar of Florida agreed, saying that those who post these images and videos may be the aggressors, but Big Tech companies are the accomplices.

Stefan Turkheimer, vice president for public policy at the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, shared how this policy would help victims of image-based sexual abuse.

“In forty-eight hours, this is done. You won’t have to be retraumatized. Every time you open a laptop, every time you get a text, every time you hear that noise, it’s someone else telling you they’ve seen you online. That ends when this bill passes.”

Although the “Take It Down Act” is expected to be signed into law this year, it may be only the beginning of a bipartisan step toward what Melania referred to as “justice, healing, and unity.”