Speaker 1: On this episode of Newsworld. On Monday, President Donald Trump
Speaker 1: signed the Take It Down Act, bipartisan legislation that enacts
Speaker 1: stricter penalties for the distribution of non consensual intimate imagery,
Speaker 1: sometimes called revenge porn, as well as deep fakes created
Speaker 1: by artificial intelligence. A legislation which goes into effect immediately.
Speaker 1: Was introduced by Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas,
Speaker 1: and Senator Amy Klobushar, a Democrat from Minnesota, and gained
Speaker 1: the support of First Lady Milania Trump. The law makes
Speaker 1: it illegal to knowingly publish or threaten to publish intimate
Speaker 1: images without a person's consent, including AI created deep fakes.
Speaker 1: It also requires websites and social media companies to remove
Speaker 1: such material within forty eight hours of notice from a victim.
Speaker 1: Here to talk about the Take It Down Act, I'm
Speaker 1: really pleased to welcome my two guests, Senator Ted Cruz,
Speaker 1: representing the great State of Texas, and Scott Berkowitz, founder
Speaker 1: and president of Rain, said, Welcome to knuts World.
Speaker 2: That's great to be with you, Nut.
Speaker 1: I'm really curious how did you become involved in the
Speaker 1: Take It Down Acting? How big of impact was the
Speaker 1: meeting you had with Elliston, Barry and her mom, who
Speaker 1: had snapchat, refused for nearly a year to remove an
Speaker 1: AI generated deep fake of the then fourteen year old.
Speaker 2: What had happened to Alliston was infuriating and it was wrong.
Speaker 2: And over a year ago, Elliston was then fourteen. She
Speaker 2: was a freshman in high school and one morning her
Speaker 2: phone started blowing up. All her friends were texting her.
Speaker 2: And what had happened is a classmate of hers, who
Speaker 2: was a boy in her class, had taken a perfectly
Speaker 2: innocent picture of her from social medi and had used
Speaker 2: an app that uses AI or artificial intelligence, to create
Speaker 2: a deep fake, and then sent to all of her
Speaker 2: classmates in ninth grade what appeared to be naked pictures
Speaker 2: of Elliston. And the technology is such that it's not
Speaker 2: a photoshop with someone's head stuck on a body, but
Speaker 2: it appears perfectly real. But it was entirely fake, and
Speaker 2: Elliston understandably was in tears. Listen, it's hard to be
Speaker 2: a teenage girl today. As the father of two daughters,
Speaker 2: I know the pressures that are on particularly our girls.
Speaker 2: It was even more frustrating because the way the law was,
Speaker 2: what the boy had done was not illegal. It was
Speaker 2: perfectly illegal to do that. The Take It Down Act
Speaker 2: corrects that now. And what it does is two things. One,
Speaker 2: it makes it a crime, a felony to post non
Speaker 2: consensual intimate imagery, either real pictures so called revenge porn,
Speaker 2: or in Elliston's case, deep fakes of real people. But two,
Speaker 2: and this goes right to your question, new it puts
Speaker 2: a legal obligation on the tech platforms to pull the
Speaker 2: content down.
Speaker 1: When you'd decided to sponsor the Take It Down Act,
Speaker 1: I notice she got your colleague, Senator Emmykloboshar. How did
Speaker 1: you and Amy come together to make this a bipartisan bill.
Speaker 2: The way the issue came to my attention initially is
Speaker 2: because Elliston is a Texan and her mom, Anna is
Speaker 2: a Texan. They live in Alito, Texas, which is North
Speaker 2: Texas outside Dallas Fort Worth. And her mom called my
Speaker 2: office and said, you're my senator, can you help me?
Speaker 2: And my staff elevated it to me and we looked
Speaker 2: at what happened to Alliston and thought it was horrible,
Speaker 2: and we discovered this was a phenomenon that was happening
Speaker 2: all over the country. Last year there was a three
Speaker 2: thousand percent increase in deep fakes, and over ninety percent
Speaker 2: of the victims are women and teenage girls. And so
Speaker 2: we drafted the Take It Down Act to fix this problem.
Speaker 2: And Amy Klobuchar and I worked together quite a bit.
Speaker 2: We're on two committees together. We're on Judiciary together, and
Speaker 2: we're on Commerce together. I'm the chairman of the Senate
Speaker 2: Commerce Committee. And she and I have had a good
Speaker 2: relationship for thirteen years, and so I approached Amien. She's
Speaker 2: been very active in the tech space as of I
Speaker 2: and reining in abuses of big tech, and I asked,
Speaker 2: you want to join me on this and she said yes.
Speaker 2: And in fact, the first time I met Elliston and
Speaker 2: Anna was when they came to d C to join
Speaker 2: Amy and me for the press conference announcing the bill.
Speaker 2: And we're sitting in my office and I asked, I said, well,
Speaker 2: whatever happened to the pictures? And Anna Elliston's mother she
Speaker 2: expressed enormous frustration. She said, you know, this was nine
Speaker 2: months ago. This happened and she said, I've been on
Speaker 2: the phone, I've been emailing Snapchat over and over and
Speaker 2: over again, and I've been running into a complete stone
Speaker 2: Wall and nude. I turned to my staff, I said,
Speaker 2: I want you to get the CEO of Snapchat on
Speaker 2: the phone today. I want those pictures down today. Within
Speaker 2: two hours, they pulled them down. But it shouldn't take
Speaker 2: a sitting senator making a phone call to make that
Speaker 2: happen and to take it down act now that President
Speaker 2: Trump has signed it in the law gives a legal
Speaker 2: right to any victim that if you notify a tech
Speaker 2: platform that picture is me. It is explicit, and you
Speaker 2: do not have my consent, they have a federal statutory
Speaker 2: obligation to take it down immediately.
Speaker 1: It's impressive at a time of great partisanship. The bill
Speaker 1: that you developed passed the Senate unanimously and then passed
Speaker 1: the House in a four h nine to two vote.
Speaker 1: I mean, they are not many things that have that
Speaker 1: level of unanimity. So obviously you had found a sweet spot.
Speaker 1: And I'm curious, how did you craft this to fit
Speaker 1: within the First Amendment rights.
Speaker 2: Well, we made it explicitly focused on non consensual intimate imagery.
Speaker 2: And there are a lot of laws across the country
Speaker 2: that deal with so called revenge porn, where say a
Speaker 2: boyfriend and girlfriend are in a romantic relationship and they
Speaker 2: choose to take explicit pictures or videos, and then they
Speaker 2: have a bad breakup and one or the other decides
Speaker 2: to post that to the world, to stick it to
Speaker 2: their former boyfriend or girlfriend, and that I think is
Speaker 2: a grotesque violation of privacy. And those laws have been
Speaker 2: upheld across the country because you don't have a right
Speaker 2: to do that to somebody else. Texas has a revenge
Speaker 2: porn law. The problem is Texas's law did not cover
Speaker 2: deep fakes. Deep fakes are a new enough phenomenon that
Speaker 2: most of the laws in place. That's a hole in
Speaker 2: the law, and so this did not meet the legal
Speaker 2: definition of child pornography, even though these appeared to be
Speaker 2: naked pictures of a fourteen year old girl and a
Speaker 2: real fourteen year old girl. Because they were deep fakes,
Speaker 2: they didn't fall under the definitions of child porn, and
Speaker 2: so we define it. It's clear the First Amendment does
Speaker 2: not cover the right to put out revenge porn and
Speaker 2: target an individual. And it's also clear the First Amendment
Speaker 2: doesn't cover child pornography, and so we put deep fakes
Speaker 2: in that explicit category. And I'll tell you on the
Speaker 2: take it down obligation new What we did is we
Speaker 2: borrowed from an existing legal framework. So there's a long
Speaker 2: standing law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that if
Speaker 2: you tweet out a song from the Lion King, they'll
Speaker 2: take it down within hours because you don't have a
Speaker 2: right to violate someone else's copyright or trademark. And so
Speaker 2: every tech platform has an office that deals with notice
Speaker 2: and takedowns where they get notified Okay, this is copyrighted
Speaker 2: material and they pull it down. Well, what we did
Speaker 2: is we put this in that same bucket. So that
Speaker 2: same office that is pulling down the tweet of the
Speaker 2: Lion King. Now if a teenager or a woman notifies, hey,
Speaker 2: this is nonconsensual intimate imagery, that same office and that
Speaker 2: same mechanism has the statutory obligation to remove the content.
Speaker 1: I know it says you were developing this. First Lady,
Speaker 1: Milennia Trump, had been leading a be Best campaign. One
Speaker 1: of her concerns was online safety. How helpful was she
Speaker 1: in drawing attention to the whole concept of take it Down?
Speaker 2: So the First Lady was incredibly helpful. In the last Congress,
Speaker 2: we passed take it Down through the Senate passed it unanimously,
Speaker 2: and then in the House, unfortunately it failed to get passed.
Speaker 2: House leadership had added it to the Continuing Resolution in
Speaker 2: December that was going to pass, but then if you remember,
Speaker 2: that Continuing Resolution got pulled down and much of the
Speaker 2: stuff that had been added got stripped out of it.
Speaker 2: So it did not pass last Congress. And so this Congress,
Speaker 2: starting in January, we passed it again through the Senate,
Speaker 2: and the real challenge a new you've been speaker, you know,
Speaker 2: House leadership has a million different demands in terms of
Speaker 2: where to allocate floor time, and so the challenge was
Speaker 2: getting this to rise up the priority so that it
Speaker 2: gets a vote on the House floor. And the First
Speaker 2: Lady reached out and called my office and said she
Speaker 2: was very interested in this bill and she wanted to help,
Speaker 2: which I thought was fantastic. So I invited the first
Speaker 2: Lady to come to Capitol Hill and we did a
Speaker 2: roundtable with the victims. And so the first Lady heard
Speaker 2: from Elliston directly heard her story. She heard from Francesca Mani,
Speaker 2: who is a fifteen year old girl in New Jersey
Speaker 2: who the exact same thing happened to her. That happened
Speaker 2: to Elliston. She also heard from Brandon Guffey, who is
Speaker 2: a state rep in South Carolina, whose story is even
Speaker 2: more tragic. His son got a direct message from what
Speaker 2: he thought was a cute girl, and this supposed cute
Speaker 2: girl convinced him to send naked pictures of himself to her. Well,
Speaker 2: it turns out that that cute girl was in fact
Speaker 2: a con man who began sextorting him and saying, send
Speaker 2: me money now, or I'm going to take these naked
Speaker 2: pictures you just said, I'm going to send them to
Speaker 2: your parents, to your family, to your friends. And tragically,
Speaker 2: this young man, Gavin, took his own life. He committed suicide.
Speaker 2: And Brandon told that story. The time between the first
Speaker 2: direct message from the con man and when his son
Speaker 2: took his life was ninety minutes. And we've seen suicides
Speaker 2: all across the country from this growing problem. And so
Speaker 2: when the first lady came and heard these stories firsthand,
Speaker 2: and she leaned in at the roundtable, the Speaker of
Speaker 2: the House was there, Steve Scalise, the Majority leader, was there,
Speaker 2: Brett Guthrie, the relevant committee chairman in the House was there,
Speaker 2: and Milania asked them, will you commit to getting this done,
Speaker 2: and House leadership said absolutely, And I think the first
Speaker 2: Lady's involvement elevated and sped up the progress dramatically and
Speaker 2: helped us get it over the finish.
Speaker 1: Line, teenage suicide has become a terrible problem and now
Speaker 1: extends down to like eight, nine and ten year olds,
Speaker 1: and a lot of it I think comes straight out
Speaker 1: of the effect of social media and the effect of
Speaker 1: isolation because of people paying so much attention to their
Speaker 1: cell phones. Let me ask you, do you see additional
Speaker 1: legislation evolving as we learn more about these kinds of problems,
Speaker 1: and do you think they can evolve in a bipartisan way.
Speaker 2: I think Congress needs to do more to protect kids online.
Speaker 2: When you and I were teenagers, their challenges to being
Speaker 2: a teenager, but we didn't face all of these forces.
Speaker 2: Our kids. We give them a phone, and every predator
Speaker 2: on earth has access to them, every evil force, the
Speaker 2: pressures that are on our kids. You look at social media,
Speaker 2: they push substance abuse, they push self harm, they push
Speaker 2: body image issues and self worth issues, and it increases
Speaker 2: depression and increases anxiety and increases suicidal ideation. So one
Speaker 2: example of a build that I want to move is
Speaker 2: a bill called Keep Kids Off Social Media or COSMA,
Speaker 2: which I've introduced with Brian Shotts, Democrat from Hawaii, and
Speaker 2: it does three things. Number one, it prohibits children under
Speaker 2: thirteen from having social media accounts. I think there's no
Speaker 2: reason for a child that young to have a social
Speaker 2: media account. Number two, it prohibits tech platforms from using
Speaker 2: algorithmic boosting for kids under sixteen, and boosting is how
Speaker 2: they push particular messages at kids. And then number three,
Speaker 2: there's a provision in a bill that I introduced separately
Speaker 2: called the Eyes on the Board Bill, that says that
Speaker 2: any schools that receive federal funds have to block social
Speaker 2: media on campus. That if you're in class, there's no
Speaker 2: reason for you to be on Snapchat, you ought to
Speaker 2: be listening to the lessons. And that bill we passed
Speaker 2: out of the Commerce Committee with overwhelming bipartisan support. It
Speaker 2: is yet to pass the Senate, but I think that
Speaker 2: would be another important step. And I'll tell you what's interesting.
Speaker 2: Newte are colleagues that are in their seventies and eighties. Frankly,
Speaker 2: when it comes to this issue, most of them are
Speaker 2: a little puzzled by it. They just haven't dealt with
Speaker 2: it firsthand. You know, the co sponsors that I have
Speaker 2: on this bill, they're almost exclusively senators in their forties
Speaker 2: and fifties who have kids at home, who have teenagers
Speaker 2: or adolescents. And every parent I know who's dealing with
Speaker 2: this right now is frustrated and doesn't know how to
Speaker 2: fully protect their kids online and on their phone. And
Speaker 2: I think we need to do a lot more to
Speaker 2: help them.
Speaker 1: I say this as somebody in the age group you're describing.
Speaker 1: You may want to encourage the older senators to talk
Speaker 1: to their grandchildren.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I am doing exactly that.
Speaker 1: Suddenly they'd be in a new world. You are a
Speaker 1: leader on so many different topics, but on this one,
Speaker 1: I suspect you will literally be able to say over
Speaker 1: the years that you saved several thousand lives literally from
Speaker 1: committing suicide, and you saved tens or twenty thousands of
Speaker 1: people who otherwise would have been deeply humiliated and deeply affected,
Speaker 1: so psychologically so ted up. Thank you for your time.
Speaker 1: I know how amazingly busy you are, and this was
Speaker 1: a real active leadership on your part, and something which
Speaker 1: the country owes you a debt of gratitude.
Speaker 2: Well, Newt, thank you. And let me just say I
Speaker 2: appreciate the first lady very much. Her leadership was critical.
Speaker 2: I appreciate President Trump. In the State of the Union,
Speaker 2: he introduced Eliston Barry and he called on Congress to
Speaker 2: pass the bill. I would be remiss if I didn't
Speaker 2: say thank you, especially to the victim advocates, because they
Speaker 2: could have taken their pain and just hurt from it,
Speaker 2: and instead they decided to stand up and lead. And
Speaker 2: the bravery, particularly Eliston and Francesca, but also certainly Brandon
Speaker 2: and Breeslou and other victim advocates. The bravery they've shown
Speaker 2: is extraordinary and this would not have gotten done without
Speaker 2: their courage.
Speaker 1: That's great, That's tremendous. Listen, have a wonderful day and
Speaker 1: good luck in Texas.
Speaker 2: All right, take care, Thanks Duke.
Speaker 1: Jah, thank you for joining me. Can you talk about
Speaker 1: how the Take It Down Act gained by partisan support?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, a lot of credit to sender a Cruise and
Speaker 3: Center a Clovi char Sexual abuse has always been a
Speaker 3: non partisan issue. We're fortunate to have really great support
Speaker 3: from both sides in Congress. I think what Congress saw
Speaker 3: here is that tech enabled sexual abuse is the fastest
Speaker 3: growing form of sexual abuse. Every month, we're seeing a
Speaker 3: huge increase in cases. Rather than waiting until this is
Speaker 3: a problem that is too big to be fixed, Sender
Speaker 3: a Cruise and Center clovichar jumped in and wanted to
Speaker 3: do something about it so that we can try and
Speaker 3: slow it down, try and put an end to it
Speaker 3: before it hits every school in the country.
Speaker 1: The school issue of internet impacts psychologically is enormous. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't have thought it thirty years ago. But a piece
Speaker 1: of making America healthy again is getting our hand around
Speaker 1: this whole internet and social media section, which has become,
Speaker 1: particularly for very young people, an enormous part of their lives.
Speaker 3: You're absolutely right. Creating non consensual intimate images has become
Speaker 3: just shockingly easy. There are dozens of apps and websites
Speaker 3: now that within minutes a kid can submit pictures of
Speaker 3: their classmates and generate nude photos of them, and within
Speaker 3: minutes that can be distributed around the school and all
Speaker 3: around the web. So this is a new form of
Speaker 3: abuse that is having a really devastating effect on victims,
Speaker 3: and it's just growing like crazy and keep in mind
Speaker 3: worth just at the beginning of this AI revolution. A
Speaker 3: few years from now, when these tools become even more
Speaker 3: accessible and easier to use and more universal, this problem
Speaker 3: is going to be so far out of control if
Speaker 3: we don't do something about it now.
Speaker 1: The degree to which younger people in particular live in
Speaker 1: that world, their reality is in many ways an electronic reality.
Speaker 1: It shapes them. A lot of states, as I understand, though,
Speaker 1: we're trying to find a way to address this. So
Speaker 1: I think there was something like forty eight different states
Speaker 1: that enacted some kind of law. What's your sense of
Speaker 1: the state level effort.
Speaker 3: There has been some good action in the states, but
Speaker 3: the laws are very inconsistent, and states sometimes have difficulty
Speaker 3: because the Internet is open, it's worldwide. State by state
Speaker 3: regulation ultimately isn't going to work. There needs to be
Speaker 3: some federal regulation so that we can criminalize the distribution
Speaker 3: of these images across state lines.
Speaker 1: Forty eight states had enacted some kind of law criminalizing
Speaker 1: non consensual distribution of inimate images. South Carolina and Massachusetts
Speaker 1: had not. What was happening in those two states, they.
Speaker 3: Were flow to come to the game. I think that
Speaker 3: initially there was some opposition on one side about first
Speaker 3: and ending grounds the idea that we're going to be
Speaker 3: making certain images illegal. But I think to Take It
Speaker 3: Down Acted a really good job at carving out legit uses.
Speaker 3: So doctors can still share intimate images for medical purposes,
Speaker 3: law enforcement can still distribute them for investigative purposes, but
Speaker 3: when they're used to harass or abuse the subject, we've
Speaker 3: criminalized them now.
Speaker 1: So if somebody actually goes out now and deliberately sends
Speaker 1: out an artificial intelligence generated image, are they personally at
Speaker 1: risk for having sent it out?
Speaker 3: They are if they are distributing it without the consent
Speaker 3: of the person pictured in the image. And I should
Speaker 3: say distributing intimate images of children has always been illegal
Speaker 3: and still is. This expands that to intimate images that
Speaker 3: might not have been caught under child sexual abuse material laws,
Speaker 3: as well as to images of adults that are being distributed.
Speaker 1: The key part of implementing this is going to be
Speaker 1: companies like Meta, TikTok, Google. What's their responsibility?
Speaker 3: They do have really a key role here. One of
Speaker 3: the most important provisions of the Take It Down Act
Speaker 3: is a requirement that the big tech platforms, once they're
Speaker 3: notified of a non consentual intimate image on their platform,
Speaker 3: they have to take it down within forty eight hours.
Speaker 3: That's the provision that the Take It Down Act is
Speaker 3: named for. We are hoping that the tech companies will
Speaker 3: really embrace the responsibility here. This is about looking out
Speaker 3: for their customers, and this is about treating their user
Speaker 3: as well. It's incredibly traumatic for a kid to find
Speaker 3: out that their naked image is circulating around on TikTok,
Speaker 3: around on Instagram and not have a way to get
Speaker 3: it down. And so this finally makes it easy for
Speaker 3: someone to identify an image tell the platform, and the
Speaker 3: platform then has two days to take it down.
Speaker 1: This bill gets signed in a law in May, and
Speaker 1: yet you're setting a deadline of July fourth, which is
Speaker 1: by normal federal standards, amazingly fast. What was your rationale
Speaker 1: from these very big corporations moving this quickly.
Speaker 3: We're being optimistic here, but the law gives the federal
Speaker 3: government a year to fully implement it, and there's the
Speaker 3: whole process of the Federal Trade Commission having to come
Speaker 3: up with regulations around it. But what we're asking is,
Speaker 3: we've worked with a lot of these tech companies before
Speaker 3: they can move very quickly. This is not a complicated
Speaker 3: process or complicated technology that they need to build to
Speaker 3: implement this. They need to add a button on their
Speaker 3: site that lets people click and report an image, and
Speaker 3: then they need to set up an automated process and
Speaker 3: that image gets taken down off their site. So this
Speaker 3: is something if they are committed to it, they could
Speaker 3: get done in days.
Speaker 1: And the normal process of lobbyist in Washington. I'm surprised
Speaker 1: there wasn't a huge effort to delay implementation. What would
Speaker 1: the cost in human terms have been if you had
Speaker 1: delayed the implementation for.
Speaker 3: A year, literally millions of new victims who would have
Speaker 3: had no recourse. Every one of these images, once they're
Speaker 3: out on the web can be distributed thousand times and
Speaker 3: can have millions of viewers, So the human cost would
Speaker 3: have just been extraordinary. And one of the reasons that
Speaker 3: this was passed by the House so quickly this year
Speaker 3: was the involvement of the First Lady Lania Trump decided
Speaker 3: to take up this cause and to push for the
Speaker 3: passage of the takendown at This is actually the first
Speaker 3: policy that she worked on when she became First Lady
Speaker 3: this term, and that really motivated the leadership of the
Speaker 3: House and members of Congress to do something about this,
Speaker 3: to move this quickly. So I got to give her
Speaker 3: huge credit for being in the lead on this and
Speaker 3: understanding that this is such an important issue for the
Speaker 3: health and well being of kids.
Speaker 1: I suspect given her background as a world class model,
Speaker 1: and she probably fully understood the importance of imagery and
Speaker 1: how devastating it could be to have the wrong image
Speaker 1: out there and what do we do to kids because
Speaker 1: there's a period there and adolescents where the very sensitive,
Speaker 1: very insecure, And of course you had a frightening increase
Speaker 1: in suicide, which I think is partially associated with cyber
Speaker 1: bullying and cyber isolation. And so I think her role
Speaker 1: in this was a great place for her to focus
Speaker 1: her prestige and her experience. But it wouldn't have happened
Speaker 1: I think without your organization. RAIN. Talk about how RAIN
Speaker 1: came to be and what its focus is.
Speaker 3: Sure so RAIN is the largest anti sexual violence organization
Speaker 3: in the US. We work on public policy, trying to
Speaker 3: improve the criminal justice system, trying to make sure that
Speaker 3: more perpetrators are caught and convicted. We work on public education,
Speaker 3: trying to help affect what the country understands and how
Speaker 3: they react to sexual violence and motivate them to help
Speaker 3: prevent further harm. And then we helped victims. We run
Speaker 3: the National Sexual Sault Hotline. We also run a hotline
Speaker 3: for the Department of Defense for members of the US
Speaker 3: military around the world, and our victim Service programs helped
Speaker 3: more than thirty thousand survivors every month. We've helped more
Speaker 3: than five million survivors of rape in their loved ones
Speaker 3: since we started it up.
Speaker 1: What does RAIN stand for.
Speaker 3: Rape of These Incests National Network?
Speaker 1: When was it?
Speaker 3: Creed started it up in nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 1: And what was the empetus so?
Speaker 3: And who started I started it out and the emphasis
Speaker 3: there was a service gap, there was a need for
Speaker 3: a national hotline somewhere for victims of rape to go
Speaker 3: to get support, to get advice, to get information and help.
Speaker 3: We originally started by launching the National Sexual Salt Hotline,
Speaker 3: and then within a couple of years started our work
Speaker 3: on public policy and really had great support going back
Speaker 3: to when you were speaker, you were terrifically helpful on
Speaker 3: these issues and supportive of the work we were trying
Speaker 3: to do, which I'm really grateful.
Speaker 1: For During the twenty one years that you've been doing this,
Speaker 1: has the hotline had a series of trends that devolved
Speaker 1: or are the patterns you can see that are somehow informative.
Speaker 3: We've seen a huge growth in usage of the National
Speaker 3: Sexual Salt Hotline. We were helping about forty thousand people
Speaker 3: a year back in nineteen ninety five. Now we're helping
Speaker 3: nearly forty thousand people a month, So the demand has grown.
Speaker 3: People being willing to reach out for help. We've seen
Speaker 3: that grow and we've seen a big evolution in every
Speaker 3: year more and more kids reach out to us. About
Speaker 3: half of victims are minors, and that's reflected and the
Speaker 3: people who are contacting the National Sexual Salt Hotline and
Speaker 3: asking for help.
Speaker 1: Do you think the increase represents the increased problem in
Speaker 1: the society or an increased awareness of the hotline.
Speaker 3: I think that the increase is primarily based because of
Speaker 3: increased awareness, increase comfort in talking about the issue, and
Speaker 3: the diminishment of the stigma around it. I think that
Speaker 3: kids more and more have a better understanding that they're
Speaker 3: not to blame here anymore than a victim of a
Speaker 3: mugging or a victim of any other violent crime is
Speaker 3: to blame. This is a violent crime that the FBI
Speaker 3: ranks it second only to murder in terms of seriousness,
Speaker 3: So there's nothing to be ashamed about for a kid
Speaker 3: who's a victim or for an adult. The other trend
Speaker 3: we're seeing is a huge increase every month in the
Speaker 3: number of calls that we're getting better about technology enabled
Speaker 3: sexual piece like nonconsensual images. We're seeing that increase every
Speaker 3: single month, and I think that five years from now,
Speaker 3: I think that that's probably going to be the majority
Speaker 3: of the cases that we're getting.
Speaker 1: If people do want to call with any help and support,
Speaker 1: what number do they call?
Speaker 3: They can reach us by phone at one eight hundred
Speaker 3: sixty five six Hope Hope, or they can get help
Speaker 3: through online chat at hotline dot ranrii n dot org.
Speaker 1: And we'll post both of those on our show page,
Speaker 1: so anybody who knows somebody who needs help can give
Speaker 1: them that information and help them get to Scott and
Speaker 1: to his team. I think there's a significant step forward
Speaker 1: in dealing with what sadly is a crisis, and I
Speaker 1: think frankly, what you've done with the take it Down
Speaker 1: Act begins to get ahead of the curve. We're going
Speaker 1: to face huge challenges and how we deal with an
Speaker 1: electronic world that we're beginning to realize has many different
Speaker 1: negative effects on our kids. And I think you're a
Speaker 1: piece of that solution. And I think it's great that
Speaker 1: you were able to work in a bipartisan way and
Speaker 1: work with the first Lady to get this moved all
Speaker 1: the way into law, which is in this Congress a
Speaker 1: substantial achievement.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you, we appreciate it. We're thrilled to have
Speaker 3: worked on this. And I think that this is the
Speaker 3: first big piece of legislation that has passed that puts
Speaker 3: restrictions on this sort of abuse and puts requirements on
Speaker 3: the big tech companies to address sexual abuse. So we're
Speaker 3: really optimistic that this was passed quickly and early enough
Speaker 3: to really make a difference and hopefully slow down the
Speaker 3: growth of this and help Picktims Scott.
Speaker 1: I want to thank you for joining me. Our listeners
Speaker 1: can learn more about the Take It Down Act by
Speaker 1: visiting your website at RAI N dot org. And I
Speaker 1: encourage people to read about it and understand that this
Speaker 1: law will only protect our children and our grandchildren. Thank
Speaker 1: you to my guest Senator Ted Cruz and Scott Berkowitz.
Speaker 1: You can learn more about the Take It Down Act
Speaker 1: on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is
Speaker 1: produced by Gingrid Spree sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer
Speaker 1: is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork
Speaker 1: for the show was created by Steve Penley special thanks
Speaker 1: to the team of Gingishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld,
Speaker 1: I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate
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Speaker 1: at Gangwish three sixty dot com slash newsletter I'm nude, Gingrich.
Speaker 1: This is nuts World.