‘Take It Down’ Act Threat to Free Speech

By Donald Jeffries

The government never ceases its attempts to censor dissenting voices. The First Amendment is hanging by a thread already, with millions of Americans evidently not supporting it. The House of Representatives has just passed legislation that leads us further down this slippery slope. Any exceptions to free speech contradict the purpose of the First Amendment.

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The so-called “Take it Down” Act ostensibly applies to “offensive” sexual content. The problem with this is that different people find different things offensive.

And it is extremely naïve to think that those who abhor the concept of free speech are going to stop there. There are no safeguards in this legislation to protect against frivolous or bad-faith “take down” requests. For example, some anti-government views could potentially be “taken down” if those writings happened to include an image that someone found offensive.

The act will apparently rely on notoriously unreliable automated filters, which tend to “take down” first and ask questions later. The act uses an unreasonably short 48 hours for users to remove the “offensive content.” As a result, online service providers aren’t likely to even take the time to verify the allegation, and will likely just take it down upon request.

This law uses the hobgoblin of “offensive images,” especially child pornography, to frighten those who might otherwise be opposed to such censorship, but child pornography is not readily available anywhere on the internet. The objective here, as always, is to eliminate dissenting views.

The act also references “exploitation” and “deep fakes,” which had leftists outraged when the target was Kamala Harris. It will, no doubt, make political satire illegal.

Ideological foes Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Amy Klo­buchar (D-Minn.), along with First Lady Melania Trump, were among those cheerleading the act. The mantra is that nonconsensual images, real or AI-generated, target mostly women and children.

Those opposing the measure were concerned about the chilling effect on consensual adult content, which is protected free speech. “This bill conflates non-consensual harm with adult pornography, ignoring the legal distinction,” noted one Republican.

This act seems to be out of the Project 2025 playbook, whereby conservatives called for stricter online content regulation. Anyone with a trace of civil liberation in them should realize how dangerous such a proposal could become. Donald Trump himself illustrated the frightening implications of this legislation when he told Congress:

The Senate just passed the Take It Down Act. … Once it passes the House, I look forward to signing that bill into law. And 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.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation said:

The Take It Down Act is an overbroad, poorly drafted bill that would create a powerful system to pressure removal of internet posts, with essentially no safeguards. While the bill is meant to address a serious problem—the distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII)—the notice-and-takedown system it creates is an open invitation for powerful people to pressure websites into removing content they dislike.

There are no penalties for applying very broad, or even farcical definitions of what constitutes NCII, and then demanding that it be removed.

Trump’s words betrayed what the real purpose of the bill is: to silence dissent.

A recent example of a clearly satirical deep fake video that could be targeted under this act was a recent video of Trump kissing Elon Musk’s feet. While these deep fakes look very real, it should have been obvious to anyone that it wasn’t an authentic video. While this clearly wouldn’t be “nonconsensual intimate imagery,” the take down language in the bill applies to an “identifiable individual” engaged in “sexually explicit conduct.”   Someone could claim Trump was displaying a foot fetish in this video!

Such definitions leave way too much room for interpretation, with graphic nudity or images not necessarily requited. There is nothing to stop an Anti-Defamation League or Southern Poverty Law Center from declaring an entire website or blog to be subject to the law. With only 48 hours to respond, how many websites or blogs could fight that? Whatever real victims of online harassment might be protected by this act, the damage to what’s left of free speech doesn’t seem worth it.

In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, unable to define “obscenity,” famously declared, “I know it when I see it.” That’s the problem with any abridgement of expression. We can’t trust our hopelessly corrupt officials to know it when they see it.

It’s highly unlikely that any of these virtue-signaling leaders are concerned about anyone being exploited. They are more concerned about online content that questions authority and exposes wrongdoing. The entire alt media could be suspect under this law. Free speech means free speech.

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