Senate lawmakers unanimously passed the bipartisan-led Take It Down Act that would force social media companies to speedily remove sexually explicit deepfakes, prevent them from being posted and criminalize the act.
For deepfake pornography victims like 15-year-old Elliston Berry, the measure would be long overdue.
The Texas high school student is working with lawmakers to get the bill passed to protect victims like herself. She’s inspired by her own story from last year, when she discovered deepfake nude images of herself circulating across social media in a sinister cyber scheme that turned her life upside down.
“A classmate took an innocent photo off my Instagram and put it through an editing tool that stripped my clothing off and sent it around my entire school,” she recalled Thursday on “Fox & Friends.”
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Texas teen Ellison Berry speaks on the Take It Down Act, which would require social media companies to restrict deepfake pornography on their platforms. (Fox News/Screengrab)
“A lot of my friends were also targeted. A lot of my classmates were able to realize the original picture and, because it happened to so many of the girls in my grade, you are able to [tell] these were fake, and we were able to go to the school and hopefully try to do something about it.”
It took nine months – and help from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz – to get the images removed.
“If you tweet out right now, today, sing a song from ‘The Lion King,’ social media will take that down within hours because you can’t send out copyrighted material,” Cruz told FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth.
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Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, attends a Senate Judiciary Committee markup in Hart Building on Thursday, May 11, 2023. Cruz has helped Berry get the graphic deepfakes taken off the web. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“So every one of these tech companies has an office devoted to doing this [removing deepfakes]. And so what we’re doing is saying if somebody is being victimized by photos or videos or any other fake lie that is going after them, they should have a right to take that abuse offline.”
The bipartisan effort led by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Cruz unanimously passed the Senate and now heads to the House of Representatives.
Cruz is calling on the House to act on the bill before the end of the month. Berry hopes to see lawmakers pass this before Christmas.
“We are urging the House to pass this bill in order to protect so many people. The future generation is at risk. This is what we are aiming at, and there are so many people and so many victims that don’t have the ability to go and to tell their story, so that’s what we are pushing. We’re pushing to pass this bill as soon as possible just to protect the people,” she said.
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