It's Too Soon To Tell If the TAKE IT DOWN ACT Is Working (Cuevas, Tech Policy Press, May 13 2026)

An analytical piece published in Tech Policy Press on May 13, 2026 by Alejandro Cuevas, a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. The article marks the one-year anniversary of the TAKE IT DOWN Act (signed May 19, 2025) and its May 19, 2026 platform-compliance deadline, distilling findings from Cuevas et al.'s arXiv preprint 2602.02754 (early 2026), an empirical study of three online forums hosting AI-generated nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII): 4chan, Website A, and Website B (the latter two anonymized to avoid routing traffic to them). The article argues that federal criminalization had not slowed the AI-NCII ecosystem in its first year, and that platform-side enforcement is the next test of whether the Act takes effect. (Source: techpolicy.press)

Summary of findings

The studied ecosystem

The preprint examines three forums. The first, MrDeepfakes, was described by 404 Media as the previous "go-to site for nonconsensual deepfake porn" and had roughly 50,000 registered users before it shut down two weeks before the TAKE IT DOWN Act was signed, after critical infrastructure operators rescinded services. The other two studied sites, anonymized as Website A and Website B, each have millions of registered users, orders of magnitude larger than MrDeepfakes ever was, and host dedicated subforums for AI-generated pornography of real people. On 4chan, the researchers track a subforum where users request nudification services, which they use as a proxy for demand.

Cuevas frames the takedown-then-resurrection cycle as structural rather than anomalous, noting that MrDeepfakes itself was founded one week after the /r/deepfakes subreddit was removed from Reddit.

Post-passage growth

Both supply and demand for AI-NCII increased across all three forums after passage of the TAKE IT DOWN Act. Cuevas offers two non-exclusive hypotheses for the increase: that the law's publicity attracted new users, and that users migrated from MrDeepfakes and from platforms that tightened their policies, such as CivitAI, which removed real-person-likeness content models (Source: civitai.com).

The article describes a collapse in creation cost: nudification websites accept a reference image plus a text prompt and return a result in seconds, often for cents or for free. Mainstream AI products have been found to comply with lewd requests, including xAI's Grok (per Wired). Technically capable users can also run AI models locally, which Cuevas describes as "offline and hidden away from legal and technical interventions."

Enforcement landscape

Under the TAKE IT DOWN Act, covered platforms must have a 48-hour notice-and-takedown process in place by the May 19, 2026 deadline. A valid removal request requires a signature (physical or digital), sufficient information to locate the content, a good-faith statement of non-consent, and contact information. 4chan added instructions for takedown requests in the prior year, but Cuevas reports that the researchers "did not observe any substantial deletions of content, which suggests not many users have sent removal requests"; Websites A and B had yet to provide a removal protocol. In early May 2026, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson issued a "reminder to businesses" of their obligations under the Act and the penalties for non-compliance. The first criminal conviction under the Act occurred in April 2026, per a joint release from Senators Cruz and Klobuchar.

The article draws a comparison to the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act (OSA), whose enforcement began in March 2025 and which covers sexual deepfakes among broader harms; covered platforms must risk-assess and implement proportionate measures. Ofcom designated 4chan a covered platform in April 2025, fined it, and launched an investigation against Website A.

Key claims

The article advances the position that criminal deterrence had not worked on its own in the Act's first year: "the ecosystem as a whole only seemed to expand, despite users' seeming awareness of the criminal nature of their acts." Cuevas argues that platform accountability is the next test, and notes that distributed, locally run nudification models cannot be reached by takedown duties, limiting both the Act's effective surface and any platform-side enforcement.

On a criticism raised by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), that takedown requests could be weaponized as speech-suppression tools by bad-faith actors, Cuevas writes that "as of today, this does not appear to have happened," which he attributes to the Act's effective bite not yet having materialized.

Relationships

• supports: Synthetic Media / Deepfakes (post-passage empirical anchor); AI and Content Moderation; TAKE IT DOWN Act (operative-test framing)
• contradicts: TAKE IT DOWN Act's implicit theory of change (criminal deterrence as primary lever); Cuevas's data is argued to favor platform duty as the primary lever
• depends-on: TAKE IT DOWN Act (primary text), Civitai
• related: NO FAKES Act (federal, proposed), State Deepfake Statutes (MN, WA, TX, CA), California AI Transparency Act (SB 942) (provenance), Utah HB 276 — Digital Voyeurism Prevention Act + Digital Content Provenance Standards Act, Liar's Dividend, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) / Access Now / EFF on speech-suppression risk