Will TAKE IT DOWN Take It Down?

Deepfake porn, that is.  Last week, Republican Senator Ted Cruz held a news conference in which he supported passage by the U. S. House of a bill called "TAKE IT DOWN," which was passed by the Senate on Dec. 4.  Together with Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, he has called for the House of Representatives to pass the bill, which would provide federal criminal penalties for those responsible for putting up deepfake porn, as well as requiring the platforms that host it to take it down within 48 hours of receiving requests to do so. 

 

Several victims of deepfake porn testified about the life-shattering harm that deepfake porn causes.  Elliston Berry, who was 14 in October of 2023, woke up one morning to find that a fellow high-school student had created pornographic images with her face on them and posted them on Snapchat.  While she and her parents immediately set about trying to get Snapchat to remove the images, it took eight months and phone calls to Sen. Cruz's office to achieve that. 

 

Another tragic story involving deepfake porn was related by U. S. House representative Brandon Guffey of South Carolina.  In 2022, scammers used Instagram to contact Rep. Guffey's 17-year-old son Gavin.  The scammers pretended to be a young woman interested in nude photos of the boy.  After he complied with this request, the scammers demanded blackmail payments from him.  Tragically, Gavin committed suicide within two hours of these threats, and his father was mystified until the scammers began texting him and other relatives for cash too.  Sen. Klobuchar has counted over 20 such "sextortion" suicides between October 2021 and March of 2023.  Both she and Sen. Cruz are urging the House of Representatives to schedule an early vote on their bill before more teenagers die, according to a story in the Austin American-Statesman.

 

We hear a lot about how polarized politics is and how each party will ostracize any member who has any dealings with the other side.  Perhaps this rule doesn't apply to senators who aren't running for re-election again soon, but last week's news conference is an example that belies that rule. 

 

Death knows no political affiliation, and the unstable minds of teenagers are fertile grounds for sowing seeds of digital manipulation and criminal exploitation.  The TAKE IT DOWN act has severe criminal penalties for anyone who creates deepfake porn without the victim's consent, or uses such material for criminal purposes, including fines and imprisonment of up to 30 months for intimidating minors. 

 

What I was curious about was the penalties spelled out for the platforms which harbor such evil.  What would have happened to Snapchat, for example, if the TAKE IT DOWN act had been enacted and they still dawdled eight months before removing the deepfake porn that used Elliston Berry's image? 

 

The worst that could happen to the company is that it would be found in violation of a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rule.  Violating FTC rules is not something as familiar to me as a speeding ticket, for instance, so I had to look it up.  The main way the FTC enforces its rules is by levying fines, and indirectly, by raising a stink with bad publicity.  Now fines to a multibillion-dollar-revenue company can easily be written off as just a cost of doing business.  Bad publicity is less easily dealt with sometimes, but its effect is uncertain and depends on what else is going on in the media universe at the time.  While the penalties for laggard companies are there, they don't impress me as being rigorous enough to ensure that deepfake porn will really be taken down inside of 48 hours once the bill is passed.

 

Nevertheless, the bill is a step in the right direction.  We are in a situation with regard to teenagers and social media that is comparable to the situation we were in around 1970 when scientific evidence was accumulating that smoking led to lung cancer, but the tobacco companies were stonewalling that the evidence was insubstantial and refused to take responsibility for the millions of additional deaths that smoking caused every year. 

 

The remarkable thing about the smoking-and-health issue was that not only did tobacco companies eventually pay big in monetary terms, but the climate of social opinion turned largely from one that favored smoking as a romantic and adult thing to do, to one that opposed smoking as both harmful to oneself and others.  And that change has persisted to this day.

 

There are hints that something similar may happen with social media's use by children and teenagers.  Schools and parents are increasingly realizing that any superficial benefits of social media are vastly outweighed by the potential and actual harms it works on the developing minds of young people.  Many schools now collect smartphones at the beginning of a school day and prohibit their use until kids leave for home.  I don't know many people who have school-age children, but the ones I know give a great deal of thought to how old a teenager should be before they get a smartphone, and none of them let children under 12 have one, as far as I know.

 

The day may come when letting someone under 18, say, use social media—at least social media as it is today—will be regarded as, well, I'm trying to think of something that everybody agrees kids shouldn't do.  Bungee-jumping over the Grand Canyon?  My point is, laws can follow public opinion as well as mold it.  If the great majority of adults raising kids in the U. S. conclude that letting social media corrupt their children's minds is simply wrong, we almost don't have to worry about the laws, because the parents will deal with it themselves.  But we need laws to keep sneaky teenagers from evading their parents' prohibitions, and the TAKE IT DOWN act will help tremendously in this regard.

 

The fate of any piece of legislation is uncertain until it's signed, but the indications are hopeful that this bill will make it into law.  It will be only one brick in the wall of protection that we need to erect to keep social media from wreaking more havoc, misery, and death upon children and teenagers.  But every brick counts.

 

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman online edition carried a story entitled "US House Urged to Ban Deepfake Porn" on Dec. 12, 2024.  I also referred to the draft version of the bill itself at https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4569/text, the story of Gavin Guffey's suicide at https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/30/us/rep-brandon-guffey-instagram-lawsuit-cec/index.html, and the Wikipedia article on Snapchat.  I previously blogged on deepfake porn at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2024/09/deepfake-porn-nadir-of-ai.html and https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2024/09/deepfake-porn-rest-of-story.html.

 

Tesla Service Is In a Fix

 

A recent article from Vox.com reports that about a fifth of Tesla owners who took their vehicles in for servicing were unhappy with how long the process took.  And investigative reporters at Vox have perused over a thousand complaints about Tesla to the Federal Trade Commission, revealing a variety of problems with a type of vehicle that was supposed to all but do away with automotive repair shops.

 

The Better Business Bureau has received over 9,000 reports on Tesla, many having to do with faulty or delayed service, inadequate supplies of spare parts, poor communication with the customer, and poor manufacturing quality in the first place. 

 

One mitigating factor in making bad service less bad overall is that electric vehicles (EVs) supposedly need a lot less service than internal-combustion (IC) cars do.  And while that may be the case eventually, Vox quotes a representative of the consumer-research firm J. D. Power as saying Tesla owners need service about as frequently as owners of conventional cars do.  So it looks like even Tesla owners need to go to the shop about as often as the rest of us do, which doesn't help if the experience with Tesla service is a bad one.

 

In Tesla's defense, their service-center count may not include their mobile units that schedule appointments at the customer's home or business.  And because so much of the Tesla functionality is computerized, remote software upgrades, diagnosis, and repairs are often done without any need to bring the physical car into a shop.  Even so, there are enough purely mechanical or electrical problems that necessitate a trip to the service center to warrant many times the number of locations that Tesla presently operates.

 

Some independent garages are starting to work on Teslas, but this can cause problems with the car's warranty, and Elon Musk has gone on record as opposing the right-to-repair movement that seeks to break up manufacturers' monopolies on service.

 

As every general knows, maintenance and repair are a vital part of any mechanized military effort.  A lack of spare parts can defeat an army as effectively as enemy fire.  Tesla is in a unique and transient situation, as they have exploited a cultural trend against fossil fuels that is especially popular among the upper classes who can afford electric cars, and done an end run around the established automakers by reinventing carmaking from scratch and dominating the U. S. EV market. 

 

But people who wear Rolexes and drive Teslas are not happy when they have to wait a month for a service appointment and then find it's canceled at the last minute.  At the present time and for some time in the future, most people will look at the prospect of an all-electric car and decide the questionable advantages are not worth the extra cost and the other problems:  limited range, scarcity of charging stations, and now, unreliable service.  So while Tesla has done a good job exploiting the low-hanging market fruit of relatively wealthy and environmentally-conscious customers, that market may be close to saturation.

 

To people who simply want a reliable and economical means of transportation, service is at least as important as features.  And no matter how well-built a machine is initially, sooner or later something will go wrong and a qualified person will have to get their hands on the car to fix it. 

 

I will confess to some feeling of nostalgia as I take my seventeen-year-old Element in to the independent shop that is used to seeing me every few months as yet another piece of it reaches the end of its service life, and thinking, "Gee, with the coming of EVs, all these garages will go the way of the village blacksmith before the Model T."  Now I'm not so sure. 

 

For one thing, electric vehicles are really hard on tires.  The sudden torque strains and the added battery weight will destroy ordinary car tires in short order, so EV tires have to be specially designed to take the added punishment.  And most Teslas don't have spare tires—don't ask me why, but they don't.  Maybe the car's too heavy to safely change a tire on the road. 

 

While the electronics industry has gotten us used to the concept—for good or ill—of using it and throwing it away when it breaks or a software upgrade renders it useless, a $45,000 investment can't be treated like that.  Lots of people out there keep their cars for five, ten, or fifteen years, and a century's worth of progress in auto manufacturing has made that kind of longevity possible. 

 

Even if everything else on a Tesla worked perfectly forever, the battery has a known and limited lifetime.  So far, the relative scarcity and prestige of Teslas make it economical to replace worn-out batteries, but this may not always be the case.  Life-cycle engineering takes a holistic view of a product from inception to end-of-life disposal or preferably recycling.  With Tesla's current focus on getting cars out the door, it looks like the company has neglected the maintenance part of the cycle.  This may well be a temporary condition, though.

 

If I were a young gearhead wanting to open my own automotive service center, I might well choose to specialize in Teslas and take my chances that Tesla wouldn't shut me down.  Because the demand is certainly there, and it doesn't sound like Tesla is anywhere close to meeting it with their own service centers.

 

Sources:  The Vox article "Missing parts, long waits, and a dead mouse:  the perils of getting a Tesla fixed" by Rebecca Heilweil appeared on Aug. 24, 2022 at https://www.vox.com/recode/23318725/tesla-repair-mechanic-delay-electric-vehicles-ev.