President Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act into law, enacting a bill that will criminalize the distribution of nonconsensual intimate images (NCII) — including AI deepfakes — and require social media platforms to promptly remove them when notified.

The bill sailed through both chambers of Congress with several tech companies, parent and youth advocates, and first lady Melania Trump championing the issue. But critics — including a group that’s made it its mission to combat the distribution of such images — warn that its approach could backfire and harm the very survivors it seeks to protect. 

The law makes publishing NCII, whether real or AI-generated, criminally punishable by up to three years in prison, plus fines. It also requires social media platforms to have processes to remove NCII within 48 hours of being notified and “make reasonable efforts” to remove any copies. The Federal Trade Commission is tasked with enforcing the law, and companies have a year to comply.

Under any other administration, the Take It Down Act would likely see much of the pushback it does today by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), which warn the takedown provision could be used to remove or chill a wider array of content than intended, as well as threaten privacy-protecting technologies like encryption, since services that use it would have no way of seeing (or removing) the messages between users. But actions by the Trump administration in his first 100 days in office — including breaching Supreme Court precedent by firing the two Democratic minority commissioners at the FTC — have added another layer of fear for some of the law’s critics, who worry it could be used to threaten or stifle political opponents. Trump, after all, said during an address to Congress this year that once he signed the bill, “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.”

The Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), which advocates for legislation combating image-based abuse, has long pushed for the criminalization of nonconsensual distribution of intimate images (NDII). But the CCRI said it could not support the Take It Down Act because it may ultimately provide survivors with “false hope.” On Bluesky, CCRI President Mary Anne Franks called the takedown provision a “poison pill … that will likely end up hurting victims more than it helps.”

“Platforms that feel confident that they are unlikely to be targeted by the FTC (for example, platforms that are closely aligned with the current administration) may feel emboldened to simply ignore reports of NDII,” they wrote. “Platforms attempting to identify authentic complaints may encounter a sea of false reports that could overwhelm their efforts and jeopardize their ability to operate at all.”

In an interview with The Verge, Franks expressed concern that it could be “hard for people to parse” the takedown provision. “This is going to be a year-long process,” she said. “I think that as soon as that process has happened, you’ll then be seeing the FTC being very selective in how they treat supposed non-compliance with the statute. It’s not going to be about putting the power in the hands of depicted individuals to actually get their content removed.”

Trump, during his signing ceremony, dismissively referenced criticism of the bill. “People talked about all sorts of First Amendment, Second Amendment… they talked about any amendment they could make up, and we got it through,” he said.

Legal challenges to the most problematic parts may not come immediately, however, according to Becca Branum, deputy director of CDT’s Free Expression Project. “It’s so ambiguously drafted that I think it’ll be hard for a court to parse when it will be enforced unconstitutionally” before platforms have to implement it, Branum said. Eventually, users could sue if they have lawful content removed from platforms, and companies could ask a court to overturn the law if the FTC investigates or penalizes them for breaking it — it just depends on how quickly enforcement ramps up.