On May 22, 2026, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York announced federal criminal charges against Cornelius Shannon, 51, of New Jersey, and Arturo Hernandez, 20, of Texas, in two unconnected cases — the first new criminal charges brought under the TAKE IT DOWN Act since the FTC platform-compliance regime took effect three days earlier on May 19. Both men face up to two years in federal prison under the Act's publication-of-digital-forgeries provision, which criminalizes the knowing publication of nonconsensual AI-generated intimate imagery.

Why It Matters

For the deepfake-generation and adult-content ecosystem, the May 22 charges convert TIDA from a theoretical compliance overhang into an active prosecutorial regime. The Shannon case is particularly significant because it explicitly involves AI-generated depictions of elected officials — establishing that federal prosecutors will use TIDA against political-deepfake conduct in addition to the celebrity and private-victim cases the Act was nominally drafted to address. For platform compliance officers operating against the FTC's $53,088-per-violation civil-penalty backdrop, the Brooklyn indictments also raise the operational stakes: every non-removed image hosted on a covered platform is now adjacent to active criminal prosecution of the person who created or distributed it, and prosecutorial subpoenas to platforms for content-attribution data should be expected as standard investigative practice within 60–90 days. The pace also matters. TIDA was signed on May 19, 2025; the first conviction came roughly eleven months later; the first new federal indictments came three days after the platform-compliance regime took effect. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York is one of the highest-profile federal prosecutorial offices in the country, and bringing the first post-enforcement-deadline charges from that office establishes a public posture about how aggressively the Act is going to be used.

Per the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's Office, Shannon is accused of publishing at least 240 albums of AI-generated pornography featuring female politicians, musicians, and singers. Hernandez is accused of creating explicit AI images of celebrities, private individuals, and recent high school graduates — with at least one minor among the depicted victims. Together, the two cases are alleged to involve approximately 140 female victims. U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella, Jr. stated in the announcement that the men had "used cutting-edge digital technology to create images that degraded and violated" dozens of women.

These are the first new criminal charges announced under TIDA since the law's signing one year ago. The first conviction — Ohio resident James Strahler II, who pleaded guilty in April 2026 — predated the FTC's platform-side compliance deadline. The Shannon and Hernandez indictments are operationally distinct in that they were brought by a U.S. Attorney's office in active investigative mode, not as a plea deal off prior FBI conduct, signaling that federal prosecutors are now using the Act prospectively against newly-discovered conduct. Both defendants are accused of operating distribution networks rather than one-off conduct.

Sources

Update — 2026-05-24

Initial entry — story first created.