Latest / Voices for Voices® / Senator Ted Cruz's Mission to Protect Victims of Deepfake Abuse and 2025 Voice of the Year Award Recipient | Ep 316
Transcript
- 0:01Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: Hey everyone, thank you for joining us on another episode of the Voices for Voices TV show and podcast.
- 0:06Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: I'm your host.
- 0:07Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: Founder of Voices for Voices, Justin Alan Hayes.
- 0:10Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: Thank you so much for joining us on this episode, as well as our over 300 episodes where we cover topics from human trafficking survivors to keeping people safe at home from abuse, of being taken, from just really awful situations, and we want to just help people and the gentleman that we have on our show today, not only are we going to be lucky enough to ask him a couple questions, but we're going to be presenting him with our 2025 Voices for Voices Voice of the Year because of his patriotism, supporting the strength at the border for Americans, the strength at the border for Americans, human trafficking survivors, prosecuting them, as well as the Take it Down Act, which is now the Take it Down law, and you may know if you have watched any of our or listened to any of our episodes.
- 1:28Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: Listen to any of our episodes.
- 1:29Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: We have had Ms.
- 1:30Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: Elliston Berry on, where she shared her story about basically showing up to school one day and you know, whispers were going on and she wasn't sure what was happening and found that somebody in her hometown at her school in Aledo, Texas, went and used an AI program and turned a couple of her innocent photos into what we call these deep fake nude photos, and it is so powerful to hear her story, and she's not the only one that this has happened to.
- 2:09Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: There are many others across the country, and that's part of the big reason why we want to welcome Senator Ted Cruz from the great state of Texas to the show.
- 2:21Senator Ted Cruz: Well, Justin, thank you very much and thank you for your leadership.
- 2:24Senator Ted Cruz: Thank you for speaking out, thank you for using your voice, using your time, using your energy to, number one, fight for victims, but the number two, to fight to hold violators accountable.
- 2:39Senator Ted Cruz: This is, you know, we have seen on the Take it Down Act.
- 2:45Senator Ted Cruz: We've seen an explosion of non-consensual intimate images.
- 2:49Senator Ted Cruz: Roughly 95% of the non-consensual intimate images online are targeting women or teenage girls, and it's both real.
- 3:03Senator Ted Cruz: You know so-called revenge porn.
- 3:06Senator Ted Cruz: Sometimes you have two people in a consensual relationship, the relationship goes sour and one or the other decides okay, I'm going to get back at my former partner and put out either explicit pictures or explicit videos.
- 3:19Senator Ted Cruz: I think that's a grotesque violation of privacy.
- 3:22Senator Ted Cruz: Nobody has the right to do that to somebody else.
- 3:26Senator Ted Cruz: And then as you noted, the more recent incarnation of this is using AI to create deep fakes.
- 3:32Senator Ted Cruz: You know it used to be.
- 3:33Senator Ted Cruz: If you Photoshop someone's head on a body, it looked pretty fake from the get-go.
- 3:38Senator Ted Cruz: Now it is not difficult at all to create deep fakes that nobody can tell are not real images.
- 3:45Senator Ted Cruz: And Ellison, as you've noted, I've gotten to know her well.
- 3:49Senator Ted Cruz: She's a 15-year-old girl, lives in North Texas, in Aledo, and what happened to her and her mom, Anna?
- 3:56Senator Ted Cruz: She woke up one morning and her friends were texting her these pictures that had been sent all around her school.
- 4:04Senator Ted Cruz: She was a freshman in high school.
- 4:06Senator Ted Cruz: Look, I'm the father of two teenage girls.
- 4:08Senator Ted Cruz: It is hard to be a teenager.
- 4:10Senator Ted Cruz: It's really hard to be a teenage girl right now.
- 4:12Senator Ted Cruz: But if you can imagine all of your friends in ninth grade believing they're looking at naked pictures of you.
- 4:19Senator Ted Cruz: I mean that, and she was in tears, she was crushed.
- 4:22Senator Ted Cruz: But the maddening thing is there was no consequence.
- 4:25Senator Ted Cruz: It was not against any law, it was not considered child pornography.
- 4:30Senator Ted Cruz: If you send around pictures of a naked 14 year old, that's child pornography.
- 4:33Senator Ted Cruz: But because it was a deep fake, it was not considered child porn because it was an artificial image.
- 4:39Senator Ted Cruz: And so there was no remedy and so I drafted the Take it Down Act.
- 4:45Senator Ted Cruz: Actually, elliston is the reason for the Take it Down Act because she and her mom they called my office.
- 4:50Senator Ted Cruz: She's a Texan and as a constituent she complained and she said look, you're my senator, can you help me?
- 4:56Senator Ted Cruz: And I want to this girl.
- 5:03Senator Ted Cruz: And I said that's terrible, what can we do about it?
- 5:07Senator Ted Cruz: And we drafted the Take it Down Act.
- 5:09Senator Ted Cruz: It does two things.
- 5:10Senator Ted Cruz: Number one, it makes it a crime, it makes it a felony to share nonconsensual intimate images, either real or deepfake.
- 5:20Senator Ted Cruz: So it captured the hole in the law where deepfakes did not fall within the definition of child porn.
- 5:23Senator Ted Cruz: But number two, it gives victims a legal right to remove that content from online.
- 5:34Senator Ted Cruz: And you know, a second part of this story is when we introduced the bill, I invited Ellison and her mom to come to DC and another teenage girl from New Jersey, Francesca Mani, who was also 14, had the same thing happen to her within weeks of Ellison.
- 5:46Senator Ted Cruz: Both of them were very close to the same time, virtually the identical thing happened to both of them, and I was sitting talking with Ellison and her mom and this was nine months after the incident happened and I asked her, I said what happened to the pictures, and she said well, it is the most frustrating thing.
- 6:04Senator Ted Cruz: They're still up and and, and ellison's mom said she had called snapchat over and over and over again she'd emailed and just ran into a brick wall, went nowhere and and I said that's ridiculous.
- 6:17Senator Ted Cruz: I turned to my staff.
- 6:18Senator Ted Cruz: I said I want you to get the ceo of snapchat on the phone today.
- 6:21Senator Ted Cruz: I want those pictures down today.
- 6:24Senator Ted Cruz: Within two they pulled them down.
- 6:27Senator Ted Cruz: But you know what?
- 6:28Senator Ted Cruz: It shouldn't take a sitting US senator making a phone call to get action, and so what the Take it Down Act does is it creates a legal right If you are a victim and you notify a tech platform.
- 6:40Senator Ted Cruz: You have on your platform images of me.
- 6:43Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: They are non-consensual intimate images you do not have my permission.
- 7:09Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: The tech platform has now a federal legal obligation to take that what's real and what's not real.
- 7:15Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: But what makes the most difference from your position as a US Senator US Senator, this Take it Down Act.
- 7:23Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: Not only was it a Take it Down Act in the state of Texas, but as you brought it here to Washington, it became a bipartisan topic, which, as we know, is kind of hard to work through that on certain other areas, and so can you just talk a little bit about how bipartisan this was.
- 7:46Senator Ted Cruz: Sure.
- 7:46Senator Ted Cruz: So I teamed up with Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, and Amy and I are friends, we've worked together on a lot of matters and so we drafted it together, we introduced it together and last year she and I passed it through the Senate and we got it passed unanimously, 100 to nothing.
- 8:03Senator Ted Cruz: Unfortunately, last year we did not succeed in getting it through the House.
- 8:07Senator Ted Cruz: The House did not take it up, and so it didn't become law.
- 8:10Senator Ted Cruz: And then this year, with the new Trump administration, we had a really beneficial development, which is the First Lady Melania Trump heard about it and she got very interested in it.
- 8:22Senator Ted Cruz: And so the first lady reached out and called me and said hey, can I help?
- 8:27Senator Ted Cruz: This is an important topic.
- 8:28Senator Ted Cruz: I want to help and look, obviously the first lady being engaged is really beneficial, yeah, so I invited melania to come to the capitol and we did a round table, uh, and we did a round table.
- 8:38Senator Ted Cruz: I invited ellison was there, francesca was there, invited a number of victims, uh, to come and just share their story and for the First Lady to hear it.
- 8:47Senator Ted Cruz: But I also invited the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the House and the relevant committee chairman to all come and the First Lady asked them will you move this through the House?
- 8:59Senator Ted Cruz: And they committed on the spot absolutely we will.
- 9:02Senator Ted Cruz: And so Melania's involvement really helped elevate it.
- 9:08Senator Ted Cruz: There was never meaningful opposition to it in the House, it was just a question of there are lots of competing priorities and so it's hard to get floor time.
- 9:15Senator Ted Cruz: And so when the First Lady leaned in, house leadership committed we'll move it.
- 9:20Senator Ted Cruz: And so the Senate passed it, the House passed it and then President Trump signed it, and I'll tell you so there was a big signing ceremony in the Rose Garden and many of the and it's actually very cool because the president signed the bill and then he handed it to Melania and she signed it.
- 9:43Senator Ted Cruz: Oh, and I suspect I don't know this for a fact, but I feel pretty confident it's the only bill in history that's been signed by the first lady.
- 9:52Senator Ted Cruz: In fact, some of the folks in my office said well, wait, does that like?
- 9:56Senator Ted Cruz: Does that imperil its legality?
- 9:59Senator Ted Cruz: I said, no, look, as long as the law is signed by the president, anyone else can sign it and it doesn't make it not a law, but she with the signing.
- 10:06Senator Ted Cruz: So there's, if you walk in to the entrance of the White House, one of the entrances of the White.
- 10:13Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: House there's a whole wall of pictures and the picture right by the front door is a picture of Melania signing the Take it Down Act.
- 10:26Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: Incredible, yeah, that is that scene watching that ceremony in the Rose Garden, seeing the non-president Trump sign that making that a federal law, as well as the First Lady, melania, and then seeing you and Elliston and others.
- 10:41Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: And it was a beautiful day and it was very fitting for that type of ceremony to happen.
- 10:51Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: So if somebody feels like they have been taken advantage of that the Take it Down Act or Take It- Down Law impacts them in some sort of way.
- 11:06Senator Ted Cruz: What should they do?
- 11:07Senator Ted Cruz: Well, if you have, if there's a non-consensual intimate image of you that has been posted, whether real or a deep fake.
- 11:14Senator Ted Cruz: Number one anyone who creates that image or posts that image has committed a crime and they can be prosecuted federally.
- 11:21Senator Ted Cruz: It's a felony.
- 11:22Senator Ted Cruz: But number two if you're the victim, you can contact whatever platform.
- 11:28Senator Ted Cruz: If it's Facebook, if it's X, whatever it's on, you can contact them and notify them.
- 11:34Senator Ted Cruz: This is me, it's an intimate image and you do not have my consent and under the law, they have 48 hours to remove the image.
- 11:42Senator Ted Cruz: And what we did it was actually.
- 11:45Senator Ted Cruz: It was a clever idea One of the lawyers on my staff came up with.
- 11:49Senator Ted Cruz: So there's an existing legal mechanism from another law that's called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and that's been law for a long time and what it provides is it concerns copyrighted and trademark material.
- 12:01Senator Ted Cruz: So if you tweet out a song from the Lion King, they'll pull that down within hours.
- 12:07Senator Ted Cruz: You can't send it out, so we took.
- 12:09Senator Ted Cruz: So every tech platform has an office that's called a notice and takedown office and if you notify them, hey, that's trademarked, that's copyrighted, they'll pull it down.
- 12:18Senator Ted Cruz: We use this identical enforcement mechanism.
- 12:21Senator Ted Cruz: And then we said all right, we're going to use that same notice and take down.
- 12:25Senator Ted Cruz: You notify them.
- 12:26Senator Ted Cruz: They have a legal obligation to take it down, and so this empowers you to be able to remove these images online.
- 12:34Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: That's amazing.
- 12:35Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: Thank you so much for all that you do, for sitting down with us, for all that you do for sitting down with us, and we would love, as an organization, to present to you our 2025 Voice of the Year Award, which last year Elliston got and the year prior, tyrus got.
- 12:56Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: And so, senator Ted Cruz, thank you so much for all the work you do, not just for Texans, but for all of us Americans.
- 13:06Senator Ted Cruz: Well, it's truly a privilege, and thank you again for giving the voice to people who so often feel voiceless, because it is powerful and when you empower people, it gives them the ability to take their lives back.
- 13:18Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: Absolutely.
- 13:19Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: Thank you so much, appreciate it.
- 13:19Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: It gives them the ability to take their lives back.
- 13:20Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: Absolutely, thank you so much.
- 13:20Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: Appreciate it.
- 13:21Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: Senator Ted Cruz, voice of the Year recipient, senator of the great state of Texas, join us on another episode of the Voices for Voices TV show and podcast.
- 13:33Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: And again, please share, like, follow, subscribe, give us a thumbs up and until next time, please be a voice for you or somebody in need.
- 13:42Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes: Thank you, thank you.