OPINION:
Melania Trump’s image as first lady may get a much-needed makeover if her advocacy for a federal deepfake/revenge porn law reaches the desk of her husband, President Trump, to be signed into law.
Last week, she participated in a roundtable discussion in Washington to publicly support the Take It Down Act. This bill aims to protect victims of deepfake and revenge pornography. Revenge porn is the nonconsensual sharing of someone else’s sexual images. Deepfake porn is sexual content generated by artificial intelligence.
Its legislative sponsors are ideological opposites: Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota Democrat. They have marshaled enough support from their respective political party colleagues to have the bill approved by the Senate. It now goes to the House and, hopefully, to Mr. Trump. Mrs. Trump’s stamp of approval will contribute to the momentum.
Only 17 states have deepfake laws. Although most states and the District of Columbia have enacted criminal penalties for revenge porn — ranging from a misdemeanor to a felony, with possible jail time and fines often included — they represent a patchwork of laws that focus more on the harm of displaying sexual images than on the violation of personal privacy that this act represents.
Only a few states, including Delaware, Georgia and Hawaii, explicitly recognize the core privacy invasion aspect of revenge porn. Consequently, a victim may have little civil recourse to recover monetary damages under a specific state law. A revenge porn remedy may depend on the state where the photos were taken or uploaded, even though they were distributed nationwide and beyond.
Without any federal deepfake/revenge porn law, the penalties vary widely. The proposed legislation, according to Mr. Cruz’s website, “would criminalize the publication of non-consensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated NCII (or ‘deepfake pornography’), and require social media and similar websites to have in place procedures to remove such content upon notification from a victim.”
Mrs. Trump’s role in helping enact this federal deepfake/revenge porn law deserves widespread bipartisan praise. Her signature campaign, launched during Mr. Trump’s first term, was “Be Best.” Now, she is poised to demonstrate her active engagement in support of a tangible outcome, demonstrating that this is more than an abstract slogan.
• Stuart N. Brotman is a professor of journalism and media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of “The First Amendment Lives On.”
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