SALT LAKE City, Utah, Jan. 29,. 2024 (Gephardt Daily) — Utah Sen. Mike Lee has pitched a collaboration to multi-Grammy Award winning singer Taylor Swift.
Lee wants Swift to publicly support the PROTECT Act, his proposed legislation to mandate that websites “quickly remove images upon receiving notice they uploaded without consent.”
The act would also “require pornography sites to verify the age of all participants in pornographic images” and “require sites to obtain verified consent forms from individuals uploading content and those appearing in uploaded content,” Lee’s website says.
Swift was the victim last week of AI pornograpic deepfake images, which reportedly were seen by millions of people.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reportedly told an ABC reporter on Friday that White House officials are “alarmed” by what happened to Swift, and that Congress “should take legislative action.”
“We are alarmed by the reports of the… circulation of images that you just laid out — of false images to be more exact, and it is alarming,” Jean-Pierre reportedly says.
“While social media companies make their own independent decisions about content management, we believe they have an important role to play in enforcing their own rules to prevent the spread of misinformation, and non-consensual, intimate imagery of real people.”
Enter Lee, who tweeted his request on Saturday.
“Hi @taylorswift 13 and @treepaine,” the Utah senator tweeted to Swift and her publicist. “I have legislation to help get harmful deep fake images removed quickly, and create a way for people to sue companies that don’t take them down. I’m re-introduce the PROTECT Act next week. Would love your support.”
Swift, who has 94.9 million followers on X, has not yet publicly responded to Lee, who has 715,100 X followers.
Lee’s post had been viewed 18,000 as of noon Monday, according to X. It has been liked 303 times and shared 79 times.
