US President Donald Trump signed a law on Monday (19) that criminalizes the non-consensual sharing of real or artificially generated pornographic images, particularly for the purpose of 'revenge porn', a growing phenomenon. The 'Take It Down Act' bill, promoted by First Lady Melania Trump, was previously approved by the Senate and the House of Representatives, receiving broad support from both parties. 'This will be the first federal law dedicated to combating the sharing of explicit images and fake images without the consent of the individual,' said the Republican president at a ceremony at the White House. 'Anyone who intentionally shares explicit images without the consent of the other person will face up to three years in prison,' Trump said, also referring to the 'civil liability' of social media platforms that host these images but 'refuse to remove them quickly.' The non-consensual sharing of sexual images, sometimes created with the help of AI, mainly affects girls and women, including celebrities like singer Taylor Swift and Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. With the popularization of AI tools, the creation of these hyper-realistic photo and video montages has become easier and has opened up the possibility of their widespread use for harassment or humiliation, catching lawmakers around the world off guard. - Shame - 'This legislation is a decisive step in our efforts to ensure that all Americans, especially young people, can feel better protected against attacks on their image or identity through non-consensual images,' said Melania Trump during a rare public appearance alongside her husband. The first lady, who supported the initiative in March, invited several young victims of this type of practice to the White House ceremony. Among them was a Texas teenager who discovered in 2023 hyper-realistic 'deepfake' images, also known as 'revenge porn', created without her consent by a schoolmate and shared on Snapchat. 'The girls were just crying and crying and crying, they were ashamed,' said the teenager's mother, Anna Berry McAdams, concerned about the possibility of the images resurfacing in the future. 'This could affect them for the rest of their lives,' she said, highlighting the importance of victims taking action and defending their rights. - Risk of censorship - So far, only a few US states, including California and Florida, had laws that penalized the creation and publication of fake sexual images. The new federal law represents a 'significant step' in the fight against this phenomenon, declared criminologist and AI researcher Renée Cummings of the University of Virginia. 'But its effectiveness will depend on its rapid and reliable application, severe sanctions against the perpetrators, and its adaptability to emerging digital threats in real-time,' she insisted. And warned: 'We must ensure that legislative measures protect society and punish perpetrators ... without suffocating' freedom of expression. This aspect was highlighted by several civil liberties organizations, which expressed concern about the risk of censorship. 'Although the protection of victims of these odious privacy invasions is a legitimate goal, good intentions alone are not enough to make a good law,' said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, denouncing 'vague definitions and lack of guarantees' that could lead to censorship. The law requires social media platforms and websites to have procedures for quickly removing non-consensual intimate images after notification of the victims.
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