00:00That's great. Today it's my honor to officially sign the Take It Down Act into law.
00:05It's a big thing, very important, so horrible what takes place.
00:09This will be the first ever federal law to combat the distribution of explicit, imaginary, posted without subjects consent.
00:19Take horrible pictures, and I guess sometimes even make up the pictures, and they post it without consent or anything else.
00:26And very importantly, this includes for forgeries generated by artificial intelligence known as deep fakes.
00:34We've all heard about deep fakes. I have them all the time, but nobody does anything.
00:38I ask Pam, can you help me, Pam? She says, no, I'm too busy. Too busy doing other things. Don't worry, you'll survive.
00:44But a lot of people don't survive. That's true and so horrible.
00:47With the rise of AI image generation, countless women have been harassed with deep fakes and other explicit images distributed against their will.
00:57This is the wrong, and it's just so horribly wrong, and it's a very abusive situation like, in some cases, people have never seen before.
01:07And today we're making it totally illegal.
01:16Upon hearing the stories of so many women affected, our first lady made stopping these abuses a top priority,
01:23and she was given tremendous support because people, she'd go up to people and talk about it.
01:27They'd say, yeah, we know about it. We have the problem. Can we do something?
01:30And she did something about it with the help of a lot of the people, especially the political people sitting here today.
01:37Among Melania's guests in the gallery during my address to the joint session of Congress was a 15-year-old young person,
01:46Elliston Berry, whose image was turned into an illicit deepfake by a peer.
01:53Elliston, where are you? Are you around?
01:55Stand up, darling. That's fine. Beautiful.
01:57Great. Thank you.
02:01That's fantastic.
02:03Elliston quickly became a powerful advocate committed to preventing other girls from suffering the same abuse.
02:09Elliston, we salute you, and we thank you very much, and it's an honor to have you with us today.
02:13Great job, you've done.
02:18Also with us are several other brave Americans whose lives were rocked by online harassment,
02:23including Francesca Manny, as well as a South Carolina state representative, Brandon Guffey,
02:30and his family who have lost their son to suicide after he was targeted in an internet extortion scam,
02:38of which you have a lot of them.
02:40A lot.
02:41I want to thank you both for your incredible work and to reach this important day.
02:46Could you stand up, please? Thank you.
02:48Thank you very much. Great job. I've read about it. Thank you very much.
02:53It's a real honor to have you here.
02:56Because there's no place like the White House, I found out.
02:58You have a lot of places, and I just left some of the richest places, and we loved them,
03:03and they gave us a nice contribution of about $5 trillion, but this is a special place.
03:09Even they talk about it, so it's great to have everybody here.
03:13Under the law, I will sign in just a moment anyone who intentionally distributes explicit images
03:19without the subject's consent will face up to three years in prison.
03:22In addition, this law establishes new civil liabilities for online platforms
03:27that refuse to take these images down promptly upon request.
03:32We will not tolerate online sexual exploitation,
03:36and especially it's gone on at levels that nobody's ever seen before.
03:40It's getting worse and worse, and I think this is going to hopefully stop it.
03:45And not easy to do.
03:46People talked about all sorts of First Amendment, Second Amendment.
03:49They talked about any amendment they could make up,
03:53and we got it through because of some very brave people,
03:57including some very brave politicians in the audience.
04:01I want to thank the bill's sponsor, Senator Ted Cruz.
04:05Ted, stand up, please.
04:08Great.
04:09Thank you, Ted.
04:11Very effective person.
04:14And Congresswoman Maria Salazar, a friend of mine.
04:17Thank you, Maria.
04:18Thank you very much.
04:22For their amazing work.
04:24And thanks also to the 99 senators and 408 members of Congress
04:28who voted in favor of the bill.
04:30Wow, I wish we could get that vote from other things.
04:33We have another bill coming up.
04:34Do you think we'll get that vote?
04:36Maybe not.
04:37We should, but we probably won't.
04:39But working with our First Lady,
04:41we've shown that bipartisanship is still possible.
04:43That's true.
04:4499 senators, that's incredible.
04:46Senator, stand up.
04:47Look at that, John.
04:48You're here.
04:49Look at all of the senators.
04:50This is big stuff.
04:51I'm in trouble because I don't have your names.
04:54They didn't give me these names.
04:56We have so many.
04:56We have half of the Senate here.
04:58Now they're all going to hate me because I can't introduce you.
05:01We don't have the time for that.
05:02I have to get back to Putin and people.
05:04But thank you very much for being here, all of you, and congressmen, a lot of them, and women.
05:12Working with our First Lady, though, we've shown that that bipartisanship is possible.
05:17I mean, it's the first time I've seen such a level of bipartisanship,
05:21and it's a beautiful thing to do.
05:23I'm not even sure you realize, honey, you know, a lot of the Democrats and Republicans don't get along so well.
05:29You've made them get along, and she didn't even know about that.
05:33She didn't know we had a problem.
05:35She didn't know we had our problem.
05:37She got along.
05:37But I want to thank you, honey.
05:38You've done amazing that this was done when you started.
05:41And I said, I don't know, it sounds like a tough one, and yet a very important one, and you got it done.
05:46So I congratulate you, and I congratulate Dan Maria, everybody.
