The “Take It Down Act”
Is a Long Overdue First Strike
Against Pornography in Schools
by Edwin Benson May 28, 2025 https://www.tfp.org/the-take-it-down-act-is-a-long-overdue-first-strike-against-pornography-in-schools/?PKG=TFPE3604
On May 19, 2025, President Trump signed the “Take It Down Act” into law. According to CBS News, the new law “makes it a federal crime to post real and fake sexually explicit imagery online of people without their consent.”
The law’s text uses the term “nonconsensual intimate visual depictions.” At the core of the law is the fact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes it extremely easy to produce such images. The offender only needs the victim’s face from a photograph or digital image. Such depictions are often known as “deepfakes.”
Provisions of the Law
The law has significant penalties for those who produce such images. If the target is an adult, the maker could be sentenced to two years in prison. If the victim is a minor, the penalty increases to three years. This federal sentence is added to state penalties for the same offense.
In addition, the law demands that the Internet platforms used to circulate these images be held responsible. For decades, the platforms denied any guilt in this arena. They wanted to be treated as “common carriers” who had no responsibility for content posted by others. The situation, they argued, would be like penalizing a railroad for shipping a box whose contents, unknown to the railroad, contain illegal materials.
This argument might be valid if the platforms carried all messages, regardless of content. However, that position has two significant flaws. First, the platforms often had no problem censoring content that they found politically inconvenient. Second, nothing on the platform is a closed box. The very nature of social media means that everything is in the open.
The new law requires the platforms to create an easy-to-use process so victims can request removal. The platform must act within forty-eight hours to “remove the intimate visual depiction and make reasonable efforts to identify and remove any known identical copies of such depiction.” The law assigns the Federal Trade Commission the responsibility to enforce these provisions.
Bipartisan Legislation
According to a September 2024 study by the Center for Democracy and Technology, roughly forty percent of students know about at least one incident of deepfakes being shared within their schools. Given that schools are notorious “rumor mills,” that number is probably far higher.
The bill was genuinely bipartisan, a remarkable achievement in the current polarized atmosphere of Washington, D.C. It passed the Senate unanimously and the House of Representatives by 409 to 2. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sponsored the bill. The White House’s Press Statement quoted each sponsor as congratulating the other.
The new law has been praised nearly universally, although CBS noted that “Digital rights groups, however, have warned that the legislation as written could lead to the suppression of lawful speech, including legitimate pornography, and does not contain protections against bad-faith takedown requests.” The fact that the words “legitimate” and “pornography” were coupled indicates just how weak that case is.
Inspired by an Actual Situation
In his efforts to pass the bill, Senator Cruz often appeared with Elliston Berry, a teenager from Aledo, Texas. When she was fourteen, a classmate used an innocent image of Miss Berry and an AI program to produce a pornographic image, which her victimizer circulated on Snapchat.
At the time, Miss Berry informed her mother, Anna McAdams, who attempted to contact Snapchat. The social media giant was unresponsive to requests to remove the image.
Local television station Fox 4 quoted Mrs. McAdams.
“This has been a long time coming. We’re very excited about today, and to see it actually come to fruition and become law. So this is gonna protect so many people. And so as a parent who, when this happened, I had no way to protect my daughter.”
Enforcement by Schools
The nature of this offense, though, means that the effort does not stop with the passage of a law. Most violations, like the one against Miss Berry, concern situations arising from school conduct. Therefore, the school systems must play a major role in these cases. That was the concern of Education Week, the trade journal of school administrators, in its coverage of the new law.
Read About the Prophecies of Our Lady of Good Success About Our Times
Pornography is a sensitive subject within education circles. Once, a student who possessed such materials on school grounds would have been severely punished. Now, students are producing and publishing the offensive images. Complicating the situation are the activities of LGBTQ+ forces and the American Library Association in promoting pornographic materials in the name of “advocacy” for “sexual minorities.”
On one hand, everyone appears to acknowledge that these situations are devastating to the victims. Education Week’s coverage mentioned “[t]he family of South Carolina Sen. Brandon Duffy, who lost his son to suicide after he was targeted in an online extortion scam.”
To Punish, or not to Punish?
At the same time, punishment itself has been out of vogue in most American schools for decades because it declares there is a right and wrong.
To illustrate the dilemma, Education Week spoke to Jason Alleman, the principal of California’s Laguna Beach High School. Mr. Alleman is no stranger to the issue. Last year, he dealt with at least one male student who used AI to produce a pornographic image of a female classmate. The principal’s reflections were troubling for anyone who wants to see clear lines drawn between decency and sinful acts.
“‘We still want to be reflective—supportive of both victims and the students that make these potentially life-changing decisions,’ Alleman said. ‘As a site leader, there is an obligation to make sure that students and their families are supported on both sides of this issue.’”
It would be interesting to ask Mr. Alleman what “both sides” means. Can he really say that students who use their classmates to produce illegal, immoral and embarrassing images should not be severely punished? By what criteria? These crimes are not accidental.
No one “needs” to create pornography. No one does so without premeditation and preparation. It is time for Mr. Alleman and his colleagues to finally recognize that certain acts are always evil, regardless of one’s age, and punish them accordingly.
It is also time for schools to recognize that immoral conversation, profanity and immodesty create the climate for the deepfake crisis. Schools are places that need to teach knowledge and virtue. The new law is a good first step to restoring sanity in the classroom. However, much more is needed to keep the plague of immorality and pornography out of the schools.
Scoops’ Gazette
