TAKE IT DOWN Act — FTC enforcement (warning letters)

On May 20, 2026, as the FTC began enforcing the 2025 federal TAKE IT DOWN Act, Chairman Ferguson sent warning letters to 15 major platforms including Reddit, Inc., stating they appeared not to provide victims an adequate process to request removal of nonconsensual intimate imagery within the law's 48-hour window. The letters were a first enforcement step warning of civil penalties (up to $53,088 per violation) for continued noncompliance, not a filed complaint. Reddit maintains a TAKE IT DOWN Act removal form and a platform-wide NCII prohibition. Congressional scrutiny had already opened months earlier: on January 13, 2026, eight U.S. Senators including Kirsten Gillibrand sent Huffman and the CEOs of Alphabet, Meta, X, TikTok and Snap an oversight letter demanding evidence of "robust protections and policies" against non-consensual, AI-manipulated sexual imagery, plus a formal preservation request for related internal records, by January 29, 2026. The senators cited a WIRED-reported incident in which a Reddit user asked for a photo of a woman wearing a sari to be altered into a bikini and another user promptly produced and shared it, inside a community later removed for evading Reddit's AI-safety rules — the same non-consensual-imagery gap the TAKE IT DOWN Act's 48-hour removal window is meant to address.