Protecting Children Shouldn't Be Partisan: The DEFIANCE Act Is One Phone Call From Becoming Law

Independent Times News
2 days ago
6 min read

***Ocasio-Cortez, Lee Join House Members and Advocates in Calling to Pass DEFIANCE Act***

There is a category of legislation that tests whether Congress can still function: bills with no organized opposition, unanimous support in one chamber, and victims waiting on the other side of a procedural bottleneck. The DEFIANCE Act is that test right now, and the House of Representatives is failing it.

Independent voters people who judge results rather than jerseys are exactly the constituency positioned to break the logjam. Here's the full picture.

The Problem Is Real, and Growing

Sexually explicit deepfakes overwhelmingly target women and girls. At a January press conference, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted that roughly 90 percent of AI-generated deepfake images are non-consensual pornographic deepfakes, and roughly 90 percent of those target women. One in eight American teenagers knows someone who has been targeted.

The child-safety numbers demand careful handling. Here is what the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) actually reports: CyberTipline reports with a generative-AI connection rose from:

4,700 in 2023
to 67,000 in 2024
to 1.5 million in 2025

Not every one of those reports involves AI-generated abuse imagery; a large share came from companies flagging known material discovered in AI training data. But the verified core is disturbing enough on its own: NCMEC staff have categorized more than 158,000 images and videos as AI-generated since 2023, and more than 275 direct victims of AI-generated child sexual abuse material were identified in 2024 and 2025, in many cases created by people in the child's own life.

These are real children. The honest numbers are bad enough that no one needs to inflate them.

https://youtu.be/CANsWoEqExI

The Grok Episode Showed Why Law, Not Goodwill, Is Required

In December, X's integrated chatbot Grok gained image-generation abilities, and users quickly discovered they could prompt it to "undress" real women and girls. The backlash was fierce enough that advocates pushed Apple and Google to pull the app. xAI has since tightened restrictions and even sued a user who generated child sexual abuse material, litigation that revealed the company had made more than 73,000 reports to NCMEC in 2026 alone.

Maybe xAI's cleanup effort is sincere. Maybe it's damage control. For victims, it doesn't matter because either way, their protection depended entirely on the company choosing to act after the harm was already done. No law required it, and no victim could compel it. That's the gap in the current system: when a platform enables this kind of abuse, the people hurt by it have to hope the company fixes things voluntarily. The DEFIANCE Act would change that by giving victims a legal right they can enforce themselves, in court, whether or not any company cooperates.

What Washington Has Already Done And What's Missing

Congress has actually delivered once on this issue. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed in May 2025 with overwhelming bipartisan support (409–2 in the House, unanimous in the Senate), made it a federal crime to knowingly publish non-consensual intimate images, including AI-generated ones, and required platforms to remove reported content within 48 hours a mandate that took full effect on May 19, 2026, enforced by the Federal Trade Commission.

That was real progress. But criminal law has a built-in limitation: victims must wait for prosecutors to act, and prosecutors have finite resources and their own priorities.

The DEFIANCE Act (the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images And Non-Consensual Edits Act) fills the gap. Where TAKE IT DOWN gave the government a sword, DEFIANCE puts one in the victim's own hands: a federal civil cause of action. A person depicted in a non-consensual sexually explicit deepfake could sue anyone who knowingly produced it, distributed it, solicited it, or possessed it with intent to distribute, recovering damages of up to $250,000, plus the defendant's profits and injunctive relief, with a ten-year statute of limitations, no waiting on a U.S. Attorney. No hoping a platform's trust-and-safety team is having a good week.

In other words, America's legal response has two halves. One half is criminal: the government prosecutes offenders and platforms must take content down. That half exists because the TAKE IT DOWN Act handled it. The other half is civil: victims themselves can sue the people who harmed them and collect damages. That half is the DEFIANCE Act, and it's the half still missing. These two approaches don't compete with each other; they cover different situations. A prosecutor might decline a case that a victim can then pursue on her own. Without the civil half, victims whose cases never attract a prosecutor's attention are left with no way to fight back.

Laws protecting Americans from unlawful use of their image

Where the Bill Stands

On January 13, 2026, the Senate passed the DEFIANCE Act by unanimous consent; not a single senator of either party objected. It was championed by Democratic Whip Dick Durbin and Republican Lindsey Graham, a pairing that agreed on approximately nothing else. Graham's sudden death this month at 71 adds a note of unfinished business: the DEFIANCE Act now stands as one of the last bipartisan bills he shepherded through the Senate. Congress has a long tradition of honoring a colleague by finishing the work they started. Here is their chance.

The House companion, H.R. 3562, is sponsored by Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Republican Laurel Lee of Florida, another pairing you will not find co-signing much else. On January 22, they stood together with Paris Hilton and survivor advocates to demand a floor vote.

And then: nothing. The bill has sat in the House Judiciary Committee since May 2025. It has not moved since the Senate acted. This is not a policy dispute; no bloc of House members has come forward to argue against it. It is a scheduling decision. Leadership has not brought it up.

Here is the part that should bother you: this has happened before. The Senate also passed the DEFIANCE Act by unanimous consent in July 2024, and House leadership never brought it to the floor last session, so it died and had to start over from scratch. Twice now, every senator of both parties has said yes. Twice, the House schedule has said nothing.

Some will speculate about how it is an election year, and the bill's House sponsor is one of the most prominent Democrats in the country. For what it's worth, Speaker Johnson has spoken favorably of the bill, and Ocasio-Cortez has described her conversations with him as positive and encouraging. But floor time is the one currency a Speaker fully controls, and good intentions without a scheduled vote have already killed this bill once. Whatever the reason for the delay, the remedy is the same: make inaction more politically costly than action.

A bill can die of neglect just as surely as it can die of opposition. That is what happened last session. It is what is happening now.

https://youtu.be/sdE_uwkze54

What You Can Do This Week

When a bill has unanimous Senate support, bipartisan House sponsors, and no organized opposition, the only missing ingredient is pressure, and pressure is the one thing ordinary voters can supply.

Call or email your House representative. You can find yours at house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative, or call the Capital switchboard and ask for your Representative's office by name.

Capitol switchboard: (202) 224-3121

The message takes thirty seconds:

"I'm a constituent. I'm asking the Representative to push House leadership to bring the DEFIANCE Act H.R. 3562 to the floor for a vote. The Senate passed it unanimously in January. Victims of non-consensual deepfakes deserve the right to sue the people who abuse them. I'm an Independent voter, and I'm watching how this is handled."

If you get a staffer, that's fine; constituent tallies get reported up. If you get voicemail, leave it anyway.

Protecting children and victims of digital sexual abuse is not a Republican cause or a Democratic one. The senators proved that in January. The House sponsors prove it every day it languishes. The votes exist. The urgency exists. What's missing is a floor slot, and floor slots go to bills that constituents demand.

Please pick up the phone. Thank you.