May 19. Tuesday. A date to circle, mostly because your digital life just got slightly safer, or at least less legally ambiguous for platforms hosting your nonconsensual imagery. The Take It Down Act kicked in. Backed by Melania Trump. Passed with bipartisan applause that feels surprisingly rare these days. Tech platforms? They have to move fast. They have to let people report intimate images shared without permission.
No more hiding behind “we didn’t know.” No more bureaucratic mazes designed by lawyers who hate you. The FTC is enforcing it. And yes, the rules are broad. Social media, gaming, apps. If it’s online and it’s your picture, it falls under this new weight.
WIRED called around. Fourteen companies who lobbied on the bill got questions. The answers? Mixed bag.
Most said they supported it. Everyone loves the law in theory. Execution? A different story. One company boasted a secure form then couldn’t produce the link. Twice. After prompting. Two others updated their help pages only after the reporter asked. Rude, but normal. A few dumped the forms on third-party sites, making them invisible unless you already knew to look. Others waited until the very last second to turn things on.
They had a year. A whole year to build compliance machinery.
T-Mobile checked out. Broadband is excluded from the law anyway, and their core business is wires, not wall text. Fair enough.
X Corp? Silence. Elon Musk’s platform. The same one that had Grok spit out thousands of fake naked women earlier this year because users asked nicely. No comment from them. Verizon? Also radio silent. The FTC? No comment either. The rules say platforms must make removal easy. Whether X or the regulators think that applies to everyone else is open for debate.
Jennifer King at Stanford has it right. She calls reporting the most vital, often ignored part. And here’s the rub. Victims aren’t corporate compliance officers. They’re teenagers. Panicked. Maybe traumatized. They don’t speak Legalese.
King points out a nasty habit. Companies build forms but don’t test them. Especially not with kids. Probably not with anyone. You design a portal, slap a liability waiver on it, and pray no one reads it closely enough to find the gap.
The reporting piece is the most important piece, and it’s the thing companies overlook.
The Mechanics of Removal
Cornell’s James Grimmelmann breaks it down. You don’t need a lawyer, but you do need specific data. A link. A statement that you didn’t agree to this upload. A signature. Your contact info. That’s the bare minimum.
Then the clock starts.
48 hours. Platforms get two days to decide if you’re lying. If you’re telling the truth? They scrub the original. And any copies that match exactly.
Some giants play nice with industry tools like StopNCII. A British nonprofit runs matching algorithms. Meta, Reddit, Snap, Microsoft, TikTok. They plug into it. If an image exists once, the bot hunts down its clones. It works. If the platform chooses to use it.
Alejandro Cuevas sees a trap for the uninitiated. Some sites only give an email address. Not a form. Just a text field in a draft app.
Keep receipts. Cuevas warns. Links. Screenshots. Documentation. Because if you miss one detail, companies might use it as an excuse. A shield. To delay. To “dilly dally,” as he put it. The gap between a request and an action is where harm lingers.
Who Does What
Meta says it’s already compliant. Months ahead. Their help center lists paths for Facebook, Instagram, Threads. Cindy Southworth, their safety lead, is clear. The tool is built. It’s been there for a while.
Microsoft has a form called “Report a Concern.” It’s nested. You find the service, paste the link, select “Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery” from a dropdown that probably has twelve other options you’ll never click. Brad Smith calls the Act an essential tool against digital harm. The wording feels rehearsed, but the form exists.
Google and YouTube? Separate lanes. Google lets you drop ten links at a time. YouTube has its own lane. They claim to have fought this battle since 2015. Long game.
Reddit was early to the party. Jen Molina promises systems are updated for the 19th. Logged-in users report via posts. A new general form joins the site Tuesday. Simple enough.
Snap has evolved. Or claims to. A help page appeared, seemingly fresh for WIRED’s inquiry. You dig into a dropdown, past “violation,” then pick a sub-option. It’s buried, but it’s there. You have to want it enough to click.
LinkedIn wants zero tolerance. You click the three dots on a post. Pick the option. Or, starting May 19, anyone can use the Help Center form. No account needed. Human review. A rare human touch.
TikTok links to a form from the app’s share button. Mahsau Cullinane emphasizes zero tolerance. The path is internal. You report while scrolling. Easy to do, hopefully.
Epic Games is updating fields. Select “Cyber Violence,” then pick between image-based sexual abuse or deepfake material. Specific wording. It tries to separate reality from the generated horror shows that flood feeds lately.
Roblox? Users play in 3D worlds. You can still upload stuff. Nicky Jackson Colaco promises new reporting capabilities. The page isn’t updated yet. The chat doesn’t allow direct image sharing, but the dev forums? The experiences? Open fields for content. They supported the bill. Now they have to match the rhetoric with buttons.
Bumble? A dating app. Of course NCII shows up there too. Elymae Cedeno says they take it seriously. There’s a form in the Help Center. Reviews happen. With “urgency and care.” That phrase. We hear it often. The proof, as always, is in the pixel scrubbed.
The law is live. The forms are online, or will be soon. But here is the lingering doubt. It’s hard to fill out a form when you are scared. When you feel violated.
Companies say they are ready.
Are you?
