Require large platforms to publish clear terms and an appeals process
What the document says“Big Tech should be required to offer a transparent appeals process that allows for the challenging of pretextual takedowns”
The chapter proposes a transparency framework modeled on the disclosures broadband providers must make about how they shape internet traffic, requiring platforms to give greater specificity in their terms of service and holding them accountable by prohibiting actions inconsistent with those terms. It names Section 230 and the Consolidated Reporting Act as potential sources of authority.
What the document actually says“Big Tech should be required to offer a transparent appeals process that allows for the challenging of pretextual takedowns”
Large platforms should offer a clear way to appeal. Users could challenge unfair takedowns.
A platform can remove a post without saying why. The book says users should be able to appeal. The rules would have to be clear.
To require covered platforms to remove nonconsensual intimate visual depictions, and for other purposes
2025-05-19 · 139 Stat. 55
Public Law 119-12, approved May 19, 2025, does impose a disclosed process on covered platforms: within one year each must build a way for a person to report a nonconsensual intimate visual depiction and request its removal, must carry a clear and conspicuous notice of that process in plain language explaining its responsibilities and how to submit a request, and must act within 48 hours, with the Federal Trade Commission enforcing failures as an unfair or deceptive practice. It runs the opposite way from what the proposal asks. The process is for requesting a takedown, not for appealing one; the poster whose material is removed gets no appeal; the law shields a platform from liability for a good faith removal that later proves unfounded; and it requires nothing about the specificity of a platform's terms of service or accountability for departing from them.
The law makes big sites set up a clear way to ask that an image be taken down. They must act within two days. But the chapter wanted a way to appeal a takedown. Here the person whose post is pulled gets no appeal at all.