Latest news with #TAKEITDOWNAct
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Melania Trump Affirms Commitment To Protecting Children Online
First Lady Melania Trump sent a message to Federal Trade Commission officials on Wednesday, pledging continued support for protecting children from online exploitation as the agency hosted a workshop examining how tech companies harm young users. The message, delivered to participants of the FTC's 'Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families' workshop, signals the Trump administration's focus on digital safety for minors. 'I look forward to hearing the outcomes from this workshop so we can continue to shape federal policies that protect children,' Melania said in her written remarks. 'We will work together to develop tools to empower parents and youth, and we will lean on tech executives in the private sector to do their part.' The First Lady thanked FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson for his leadership on the issue. Ferguson, in turn, credited Melania with helping pass recent legislation targeting online abuse. 'I'm also incredibly grateful to the First Lady for her leadership on the 'TAKE IT DOWN Act,'' Ferguson said. 'Getting legislation done in any circumstance is very difficult, and the 'TAKE IT DOWN' Act could not have gotten through Congress without the First Lady's intervention and leadership.' The law, signed by President Donald Trump in May, allows victims to request the swift removal of non-consensual explicit imagery online. That includes content created by artificial intelligence. Melania championed the legislation as part of her BE BEST initiative, which focuses on children's well-being and online protection. The workshop appearance continues that advocacy. In her full message to workshop attendees, Melania acknowledged meeting survivors and families affected by non-consensual intimate imagery. 'Let their courage continue to inspire us to find solutions to protect children and youth from online harm,' she wrote. Still, the First Lady emphasized that passing the TAKE IT DOWN Act marked progress but not completion. The administration plans to develop additional tools for parents while pressing tech executives to increase safeguards.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Congress has only passed three laws this session. So what are they doing?
If Congress were a character in Mike Judge's cult classic 'Office Space," they'd be sweating bullets waiting for their meeting with the Bobs. You remember the Bobs, right? The pair of efficiency experts were all about trimming the fat at Initech. Their go-to question, delivered with soul-crushing serenity, was simple: 'What would you say… you do here?' Judging by the legislative output so far, we should be asking the same of our elected representatives in Congress. As of late May 2025, deep into the first session of the 119th Congress, our fearless political leaders have enacted exactly three – yes, T-H-R-E-E – laws and 11 regulatory disapproval resolutions. Those numbers aren't typos. To be fair, legislating is complex. It's supposed to be deliberative. Not every problem needs a new federal law; in fact, most probably don't. But even as a conservative, I still want Congress to make laws which rein in the size and scope of the federal government. Opinion: Tariffs and price-fixing? It's time to make Republicans conservative again | Opinion This government-by-executive-order from one president to the next is hogwash that creates economic and political whiplash. But three laws over five months suggests something beyond deliberation. It's political nihilism. Of the enacted laws, the most recent was Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-Texas) TAKE IT DOWN Act. Another was the nothingburger measure to keep the government funded, and the other was the Laken Riley Act. Good on Sen. Katie Britt (R-Alabama) and Cruz for demonstrating the ability to draft effective legislation, shepherd the measure through the House and Senate, and get the president to sign their bills. Peter Gibbons' 'Office Space' epiphany is instructive here: "Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day long, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements." Maybe members of Congress weren't meant to just sit in committee rooms, give fiery speeches to empty chambers for C-SPAN, rush to cable news studios, and fire off angry tweets. Maybe, just maybe, they were meant to legislate. The problem isn't necessarily that individual members aren't busy. Their schedules are packed, fundraisers are attended, and media hits are frequent. The problem is that all that activity produces nothing. It simply gives the illusion of effective leadership while office holders fail at their central task. Letters: Readers question motivations, actions of Tennessee's elected officials We've traded substantive legislative work for performative outrage and B-list celebrity status. Congress increasingly resembles a reality TV show where the prize is reelection, not effective governance. The only real difference between most Democrats and Republicans in Congress is whether they're clapping or booing for the current resident of the White House. So, what's the fix? How do we get Congress back to doing… well, something? One idea that keeps bubbling up is the REINS Act (Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny Act). The basic concept is straightforward: any major new regulation from the executive branch – i.e. rules with significant economic impact, often dreamed up by unelected bureaucrats – would require explicit approval from Congress before taking effect. While primarily aimed at reining in the administrative state (a worthy goal in itself), the REINS Act could have a side effect: forcing Congress to take more ownership. If agencies can't just issue sweeping edicts on their own, Congress might feel more pressure to actually debate and pass laws addressing the issues those regulations were meant to tackle. It puts the legislative ball back squarely in Congress's court. The legislation would spell it out for them: "This is your job." Opinion: TN Republicans may lose political control and respect by supporting Trump Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) recently had the audacity to tell the truth and suggest that Congress, not the president, must hold the power of taxation. President Donald Trump's tariff gamble is entirely predicated on a gross delegation of authority from Congress and a funky declaration of a national emergency. If Congress agrees with Trump's reimagination of the global economy, it should enact the tariff policies with an actual law. It could be number six. Then we'd at least be counting on two hands. We also need a way to differentiate between the workhorses and the show ponies. Maybe it's time we started calculating a legislative 'batting average' for members of Congress. Forget just counting how many bills someone introduces — that's like judging a baseball player by how many times they swing the bat, regardless of whether they hit anything. Instead, let's look at the ratio: How many bills did Representative X or Senator Y introduce or meaningfully co-sponsor compared to how many actually became law? No, it won't capture all the effort in Congress. Sometimes important work happens behind the scenes. Leaders shape bills without being the prime sponsor. A member champions a vital cause that faces impossible political headwinds. We should be honest about those efforts. But a batting average could offer a clue. It would help voters distinguish between those diligently working to craft passable legislation and those who specialize in filing "messaging bills" designed solely to generate fundraising emails and rile up the base, with zero chance of ever becoming law. It might incentivize members to focus on building consensus and achieving tangible results, rather than just grabbing headlines. We wouldn't tolerate 'Office Space'-level productivity in most jobs. We expect results. Yet, we seem to have accepted a Congress where tough talk is the norm and actual lawmaking is a rare exception. It's time we, the constituents, became our own version of the Bobs, asking calmly but firmly: "What would you say… you do here?" We must demand answers that involve more than pointing fingers and cashing campaign checks. Passing three laws isn't cutting it. That's all Congress is doing here. Don't let them tell you otherwise. USA TODAY Network Tennessee Columnist Cameron Smith is a Memphis-born, Brentwood-raised recovering political attorney raising four boys in Nolensville, Tennessee, with his particularly patient wife, Justine. Direct outrage or agreement to or @DCameronSmith on Twitter. Agree or disagree? Send a letter to the editor to letters@ This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Congress isn't doing its job. We deserve to know why | Opinion
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
APD: 11 children victims of child exploitation investigation in Austin, man arrested in case
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Eleven children were victims of a child exploitation investigation in Austin, and a 19-year-old man was arrested in the case, Austin Police Department Child Exploitation Unit Sgt. Russell Weirich said during a media briefing Thursday. Jack Bullington was charged on 10 of the cases after APD said it received those reports in September 2024. He was accused of posting 'explicit images' of the juveniles on social media, which were 'cropped' on images of juveniles' 'nude bodies' that were then altered by artificial intelligence (AI), Weirich said. Bill to protect victims of deepfake 'revenge' porn passes US Senate Three cyber tips came into police, which were generated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Afterward, police obtained a search warrant on the social media account associated with Bullington. The NCMEC is 'a nonprofit organization created in 1984 by child advocates with the purpose to help find missing children, fight child sexual exploitation and prevent child victimization,' said Jennifer Newman, executive director at the NCMEC. 'Every day NCMEC receives a constant flow of horrific child sexual abuse and exploitative material into the cyber tip line. Once received, we review and assess that information, add value to the report and refer it out to the appropriate law enforcement agency,' Newman said during the briefing. The investigation determined that Bullington 'attained photographs of the victims from a variety of social media sites and platforms when the victims were younger than 18 years of age.' He would then share those images on social media with 'another individual located overseas,' Weirich said. According to NCMEC, the nonprofit saw a 1,300% increase in cyber tip line reports that involved generative AI technology, which went from 4,700 reports in 2023 to more than 67,000 reports in 2024. 'We know it's scary, and we want you to know you're not alone,' Newman said. Furthermore, she said NCMEC has free resources to take down 'nude or sexually exploitative imagery that may be online.' This comes after the U.S. Senate passed the TAKE IT DOWN Act in February, which criminalizes the publication of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII). The act, also called S.4569, was introduced by Senators Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota. 'In terms of prevention and talking to your kids, that communication is such a key part of this. And really opening that door and having these discussions early and often with your kids is really the biggest tool in the toolbox when we talk about online child sexual exploitation. Also making sure that your kids know that you're a safe space to come to, that you're not going to respond with anger or, you know, be overly upset, that they are turning to you because they're upset,' Newman said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Just Gained Frightening New Powers to Muzzle Your Free Speech
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Had you scanned any of the latest headlines around the TAKE IT DOWN Act, legislation that President Donald Trump signed into law Monday, you would have come away with a deeply mistaken impression of the bill and its true purpose. The surface-level pitch is that this is a necessary law for addressing nonconsensual intimate images—known more widely as revenge porn. Obfuscating its intent with a classic congressional acronym (Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks), the TAKE IT DOWN Act purports to help scrub the internet of exploitative, nonconsensual sexual media, whether real or digitally mocked up, at a time when artificial intelligence tools and automated image generators have supercharged its spread. Enforcement is delegated to the Federal Trade Commission, which will give online communities that specialize primarily in user-generated content (e.g., social media, message boards) a heads-up and a 48-hour takedown deadline whenever an appropriate example is reported. These platforms have also been directed to set up on-site reporting systems by May 2026. Penalties for violations include prison sentences of two to three years and steep monetary fines. Public reception has been rapturous. CNN is gushing that 'victims of explicit deepfakes will now be able to take legal action against people who create them.' A few local Fox affiliates are taking the government at its word that TAKE IT DOWN is designed to target revenge porn. Other outlets, like the BBC and USA Today, led off by noting first lady Melania Trump's appearance at the bill signing. Yet these headlines and pieces ignore TAKE IT DOWN's serious potential for abuse. (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.' Sure, it's typical for this president to make such serious matters about himself. But Trump's blathering about having it 'worse' than revenge-porn survivors, and his quip about 'using that bill for myself,' is not a fluke. For a while now, activists who specialize in free speech, digital privacy, and even stopping child sexual abuse have attempted to warn that the bill will not do what it purports to do. Late last month, after TAKE IT DOWN had passed both the House and Senate, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote that the bill's legislative mechanism 'lacks critical safeguards against frivolous or bad-faith takedown requests.' For one, the 48-hour takedown deadline means that digital platforms (especially smaller, less-resourced websites) will be forced to use automated filters that often flag legal content—because there won't be 'enough time to verify whether the speech is actually illegal.' The EFF also warns that TAKE IT DOWN requires monitoring that could reach into even encrypted messages between users. If this legislation has the effect of granting law enforcement a means of bypassing encrypted communications, we may as well bid farewell to the very concept of digital privacy. A February letter addressed to the Senate from a wide range of free-expression nonprofits—including Fight for the Future and the Authors Guild—also raised concerns over TAKE IT DOWN's implications for content moderation and encryption. The groups noted that although the bill makes allowances for legal porn and newsworthy content, 'those exceptions are not included in the bill's takedown system.' They added that private tools like direct messages and cloud storage aren't protected either, which could leave them open to invasive monitoring with little justification. 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. CCRI has long criticized the bill's takedown provisions and ultimately concluded that the nonprofit 'cannot support legislation that risks endangering the very communities it is dedicated to protecting, including LGBTQIA+ individuals, people of color, and other vulnerable groups.' (In a separate statement, the CCRI highlighted other oddities within the bill, like a loophole allowing for nonconsensual sexual media to be posted if the uploader happens to appear in the image, and the explicit inclusion of forums that specialize in 'audio files,' despite otherwise focusing on visual materials.) 'The concerns are not theoretical,' Masnick continued. 'The bill's vague standards combined with harsh criminal penalties create a perfect storm for censorship and abuse.' Let's be clear: No one here is at all opposed to sound legislation that tackles the inescapable, undeniable problem of nonconsensual sexual material. All 50 states, along with the District of Columbia, have enacted laws criminalizing exploitative sexual photos and videos to varying degrees. TAKE IT DOWN extends such coverage to deepfake revenge porn, a change that makes the bill a necessary complement to these state laws—but its text is shockingly narrow on the digital front, criminalizing only A.I. imagery that's deemed to be 'indistinguishable from an authentic visual depiction.' This just leads to more vague language that hardly addresses the underlying issue. The CCRI has spent a full decade fighting for laws to address the crisis of nonconsensual sexual imagery, even drafting model legislation—parts of which did make it into TAKE IT DOWN. On Bluesky, CCRI President Mary Anne Franks called this fact 'bittersweet,' proclaiming that the long-overdue criminalization of exploitative sexual imagery is undermined by the final law's 'lack of adequate safeguards against false reports.' A few House Democrats looked to the group's proposed fixes and attempted to pass amendments that would have added such safeguards, only to be obstructed by their Republican colleagues. This should worry everyone. These groups made concerted efforts to inform Congress of the issues with TAKE IT DOWN and to propose solutions, only to be all but ignored. As Masnick wrote in another Techdirt post, the United States already has enough of a problem with the infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the only other American law with a notice-and-takedown measure like TAKE IT DOWN's, albeit designed to prevent the unauthorized spread of copyright works. Just ask any creatives or platform operators who've had to deal with abusive flurries of bad-faith DMCA takedown requests—even though the law includes a clause meant to protect against such weaponization. There's no reason to believe that TAKE IT DOWN won't be similarly exploited to go after sex workers and LGBTQ+ users, as well as anyone who posts an image or animation that another user simply doesn't like and decides to report. It's not dissimilar to other pieces of proposed legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act, that purport to protect young netizens via wishy-washy terms that could criminalize all sorts of free expression. Here's a hypothetical: A satirical cartoonist comes up with an illustration of Trump as a baby and publishes it on a niche social media platform that they use to showcase their art. A Trump supporter finds this cartoon and decides to report it as abusive pornography, leading to a takedown notice on the cartoonist's website. The artist and the platform do not comply, and a pissed-off Trump brings the full force of the law against this creator. The process of discovery leads prosecutors to break into the artist's encrypted communications, revealing drafts of the drawing that the cartoonist had shared with friends. All of this gets the illustrator punished with a brief prison sentence and steep fine, fully sabotaging their bank account and career; the social media platform they used is left bankrupt and shutters. The artists are forced to migrate to another site, whose administrators see what happened to their former home and decide to censor political works. All the while, an underage user finds that their likeness has been used to generate a sexually explicit deepfake that has been spread all over Discord—yet their case is found to have no merit because the deepfake in question is not considered 'indistinguishable from an authentic visual depiction,' despite all the Discord-based abusers recognizing exactly whom that deepfake is meant to represent. It's a hypothetical—but not an unimaginable one. It's a danger that too few Americans understand, thanks to congressional ignorance and the media's credulous reporting on TAKE IT DOWN. The result is a law that's supposedly meant to protect the vulnerable but ends up shielding the powerful—and punishing the very people it promised to help.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Melania Trump calls AI and social media 'digital candy for the next generation' in rare White House appearance
Melania Trump made a rare public appearance at the White House on Monday. Trump praised her for bringing together both sides on revenge porn and deepfakes. The reality, however, is more complicated. Melania Trump has never been a traditional first lady. But to hear it from President Donald Trump at a White House event on Monday, she also has a rare ability to smash past entrenched partisan divides. "I'm not even sure you realize, honey," Trump said to his wife in the Rose Garden at the White House. "You know, a lot of the Democrats and Republicans don't get along so well. You've made them get along." The first lady's purported achievement: Supporting the passage of the "TAKE IT DOWN" Act, a bill to combat revenge porn, including deepfakes generated by artificial intelligence. Trump signed that bill on Monday. Though most states already have revenge porn laws on the books, it's the first bill that Trump has signed in his second term that touches AI. Melania Trump's appearance on Monday was a relative rarity. The New York Times reported earlier this month that she had spent less than 14 days at the White House since Trump's second inauguration, and the first lady has long taken a different approach to the role from prior presidential spouses. She ultimately spoke for less than four minutes, thanking lawmakers and advocates as she decried the impact of new technologies on children. "Artificial intelligence and social media are the digital candy for the next generation: sweet, addictive, and engineered to have an impact on the cognitive development of our children," she said. The first lady has sought to put her stamp on the legislation, framing it as a continuation of the children's well-being and online safety initiatives that she undertook during her husband's first term. "Today, I'm proud to say that the values of 'Be Best' will be reflected in the law," she said. The reality, however, is more complex. The bill had been making its way through Congress last year, and it was originally supposed to be signed into law before the Trumps returned to the White House. But after the bill passed the Senate for the first time in December, the legislation was slipped into an ill-fated government funding bill that Elon Musk and hardline conservatives tanked for unrelated reasons. The spending bill that ultimately passed days later did not include the TAKE IT DOWN Act, requiring lawmakers to go through the whole exercise once again this year. The bill was also never that controversial, at least on Capitol Hill. While some digital rights advocates raised free speech concerns, only two lawmakers voted against it when it came up for a vote in the House last month. Meanwhile, it passed the Senate via a "voice vote" — meaning no one opposed it, so there was no need to hold a vote — in both December and February. On Monday, none of that was mentioned. The first lady, according to Trump, had taken up an "amazing issue," tackling a problem that's "gone on at levels that nobody's ever seen before." "Working with our first lady, though, we've shown that that bipartisanship is possible," Trump said. "I mean, it's the first time I've seen such a level of bipartisanship, and it's a beautiful thing to do." Read the original article on Business Insider
