The Take It Down Act takes full effect.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

Congress actually passed a bipartisan law last year, you know, the Take It Down Act.

It requires online platforms to take down sexually explicit deep fakes and other non-consensual intimate images

within 48 hours of a valid removal request.

And last month, enforcement began. If tech firms don't comply,

they face financial and even criminal penalties. Lauren Feiner is a senior policy reporter at

the verge, and she's been writing about the law. She walked me through how platforms have been

responding. Most of the major tech companies have implemented some

form of reporting mechanism for users to say if they see NCI on their platforms and then take action on

it. So I think what remains to be seen is just how well those systems work and what exactly the platforms do to take

action on those requests. And what kind of penalties do the platforms face if they are found to be

in violation? Basically, the FTC can enforce civil penalties of more than 53,000 per violation on the platforms if they fail to remove NCI

in the time they're supposed to when it's flagged to them.

So there's this incentive for companies to sort of police content very quickly.

I guess the worry is that can turn into a perverse incentive,

right? Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I think there's kind of two potentially perverse incentives.

On the one hand, there's the potential that platforms get a little bit overly ambitious or overly cautious with the sort

of content that they're going to take down, right? Because if you are responsible under these

large penalties for taking down any NCI flagged to you within 48 hours, you know, you might just take down

as much as you are flagged or as much as even seems like maybe it'll fall into the bucket where

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