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  • Law establishes national prohibition against nonconsensual online publication of intimate images of individuals, both authentic and computer-generated.
  • First federal law regulating AI-generated content.
  • Creates requirement that covered platforms promptly remove depictions upon receiving notice of their existence and a valid takedown request.
  • For many online service providers, complying with the Take It Down Act’s notice-and-takedown requirement may warrant revising their existing DMCA takedown notice provisions and processes.
  • Another carve-out to CDA immunity? More like a dichotomy of sorts…. 

On May 19, 2025, President Trump signed the bipartisan-supported Take it Down Act into law. The law prohibits any person from using an “interactive computer service” to publish, or threaten to publish, nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII), including AI-generated NCII (colloquially known as revenge pornography or deepfake revenge pornography). Additionally, the law requires that, within one year of enactment, social media companies and other covered platforms implement a notice-and-takedown mechanism that allows victims to report NCII.  Platforms must then remove properly reported imagery (and any known identical copies) within 48 hours of receiving a compliant request.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (the “CDA” or “Section 230”), known prolifically as “the 26 words that created the internet,” remains the subject of ongoing controversy. As extensively reported on this blog, the world of social media, user-generated content, and e-commerce has been consistently…

On May 9, 2024, a California district court dismissed, with leave to amend, the complaint brought by social media platform X Corp. (formerly Twitter) against data provider Bright Data Ltd. (“Bright Data”) over Bright Data’s alleged scraping of publicly available data from X for use in data products sold…

On January 23, 2024, a California district court released its opinion in a closely-watched scraping dispute between the social media platform Meta and data provider Bright Data Ltd. (“Bright Data”) over Bright Data’s alleged scraping of publicly-available data from Facebook and Instagram for use in data products sold to third…

Back in October 2022, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Gonzalez v. Google, an appeal that challenged whether YouTube’s targeted algorithmic recommendations qualify as “traditional editorial functions” protected by the CDA — or, rather, whether such recommendations are not the actions of a “publisher” and thus fall outside of…

Since the passage of Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act (“CDA”), the majority of federal circuits have interpreted the CDA to establish broad federal immunity to causes of action that would treat service providers as publishers of content provided by third parties.  The CDA was passed in the early days of e-commerce and was written broadly enough to cover not only the online bulletin boards and not-so-very interactive websites that were common then, but also more modern online services, web 2.0 offerings and today’s platforms that might use algorithms to organize, repackage or recommend user-generated content.

Over 25 years ago, the Fourth Circuit, in the landmark Zeran case, the first major circuit court-level decision interpreting Section 230, held that Section 230 bars lawsuits, which, at their core, seek to hold a service provider liable for its exercise of a publisher’s “traditional editorial functions — such as deciding whether to publish, withdraw, postpone or alter content.” Courts have generally followed this reasoning ever since to determine whether an online provider is being treated as a “publisher” of third party content and thus entitled to immunity under the CDA.  The scope of “traditional editorial functions” is at the heart of a case currently on the docket at the Supreme Court. On October 3, 2022, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in an appeal that is challenging whether a social media platform’s targeted algorithmic recommendations fall under the umbrella of “traditional editorial functions” protected by the CDA or whether such recommendations are not the actions of a “publisher” and thus fall outside of CDA immunity. (Gonzalez v. Google LLC, No. 21-1333 (U.S. cert. granted Oct. 3, 2022)).

Can internet service providers necessarily be compelled to unmask anonymous copyright infringers? In an opinion touching on Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) subpoenas, First Amendment concerns, and fair use, the Northern District of California said, in this one particular instance, no, granting Twitter’s motion to quash a subpoena seeking to reveal information behind an anonymous poster. (In re DMCA § 512(h) Subpoena to Twitter, Inc., No. 20-80214 (N.D. Cal. June 21, 2022)). The anonymous figure at the center of the dispute is @CallMeMoneyBags, an anonymous Twitter user who posts criticisms of wealthy people—particularly those working in tech, finance, and politics. Some such criticism lies at the heart of this dispute.