It seems the folks in Congress have finally taken a break from hollerin’ at one another and passed a bill that even a Missouri mule might call sensible. Senator Jacky Rosen hitched her name to a fresh piece of law aimed at the worst kind of mischief the modern world’s cooked up–false and lewd images conjured by clever mechanical brains they call “AI.”
The new law, stamped with the name “TAKE IT DOWN Act”—as direct as a barkeep’s warning—declares it a criminal offense to go spreading around intimate images, especially those cooked up without consent by some oily digital sorcery. It includes the kind where the subject’s never even posed, but the picture makes a lie look like the gospel.
Don’t think it’s just another law to get filed away like an old hat. This one’s got teeth. Social media outfits—the same that let your aunt post twelve blurry photos of her meatloaf—are now bound by law to remove such offending material within 48 hours of being told by the poor soul whose likeness got robbed.
Senator Rosen put it plain, “The lack of protections for victims of online abuse has put far too many people at risk, and it’s past time we took action to stop bad actors, protect victims, and hold social media sites accountable.”
Now, I reckon most decent folk would agree—when a person’s image can be stolen, twisted, and passed around faster than a bottle at a campfire, it’s high time the law caught up. And for once, it seems it has.
Now, what to do with a bad politician?
The Old Blog in the Desert 