RN
The situation this article is about has a specific shape: images or video of you exist somewhere online, you did not agree to them being there, and you want them gone. It is worth saying at the start that this is now a much better-provisioned problem than it was even a few years ago. There are dedicated services, a federal obligation on platforms in the US, and a helpline staffed by people who do this every day.
It is still work, and it is still not guaranteed. But the advice that used to be given — email the webmaster and hope — is no longer the state of the art.
If the person in the images was under 18 at any point, stop here. That is child sexual abuse material regardless of who took it or who shared it, and it has its own dedicated route: NCMEC's Take It Down service at takeitdown.ncmec.org, which can be used anonymously, and the CyberTipline. Do not use the adult processes below for it.
First: preserve, then report
Before anything is removed, capture where it is. URLs of every page, screenshots showing the content in context, usernames and post identifiers, dates. Save the original file if you have it. This is tedious and it is the step people skip.
Two reasons it matters. Takedown requests generally need a URL to act on. And if the material is later the subject of a police report or a civil claim, the record of where it appeared and when is evidence you cannot reconstruct after a page has gone.
Then report it. Not "email the site owner" — use the mechanisms below, which are designed for this and do not depend on the goodwill of whoever runs the site.
Hash-matching: StopNCII
StopNCII.org is the single most useful tool for most adults in this situation, and it works differently from a takedown request.
You select the images on your own device. The tool generates a hash — a digital fingerprint — locally, and only the hash is transmitted. The image itself never leaves your device and is never uploaded to anyone. Participating companies then match that hash against content on their services and act on hits.
That has two consequences worth understanding. It can catch copies you have not found yourself, including ones posted after you file. And it is proactive rather than reactive — you are not chasing individual URLs.
The eligibility conditions are narrow and specific: you must be the person depicted, you must have been over 18 when the image was made and be over 18 now, you must still have the file, and it must show you nude, partly nude, or in a sexual act. Reported industry participants include Meta's services, TikTok, Reddit, Snap, Bumble, OnlyFans and Pornhub, with Microsoft applying validated hashes across Bing and several of its consumer services. Google has also partnered with the programme. Coverage is not universal, and a hash cannot reach a site whose operator participates in nothing.
The legal lever in the US
The TAKE IT DOWN Act was signed in May 2025, and the obligation it places on platforms came into force in May 2026, with the Federal Trade Commission enforcing it.
The mechanics, from the perspective of someone using it: a covered platform — broadly, a service that hosts user-generated content, or that publishes this kind of material as a matter of business — must provide a clear, plain-language process for the depicted person or their authorised representative to request removal, and must remove the reported material and known copies within 48 hours of a valid request.
Two practical points follow. First, the request process is supposed to be findable on the service itself; if you cannot find one, that is itself a compliance failure. Second, if a platform ignores a valid request, the FTC accepts complaints about it at TakeItDown.ftc.gov. That is a genuinely new lever — the old version of this problem had no regulator to escalate to.
The statute covers authentic imagery and synthetic material, which matters given how much of the current caseload is generated rather than photographed.
Search delisting is a separate job
Removing content from a site and removing it from search results are different actions with different processes, and you generally want both.
Google operates a removal request path specifically for non-consensual explicit imagery, distinct from its copyright process. Bing has an equivalent. Delisting does not delete anything — the page stays where it is — but it substantially changes who encounters it, because most people find this material by searching a name rather than by browsing a forum.
Do this even when the host has agreed to remove the content. Cached and indexed copies persist after the source is gone.
Copyright, and its limits
If you took the photograph yourself, you hold the copyright in it, and a DMCA notice is a real and separate route — often the fastest one for hosts outside the US, because a hosting provider's tolerance for copyright liability is lower than its tolerance for a policy complaint.
The limitation is straightforward and the old advice on this point was misleading: if someone else took the picture, you do not own the copyright, and a DMCA notice from you is not valid. Filing one anyway is a false statement made under penalty of perjury. Use the NCII routes instead — they exist precisely because copyright was never the right instrument for this.
Get help rather than doing it alone
The Cyber Civil Rights Initiative runs a free helpline for people dealing with image-based sexual abuse. In the UK, the Revenge Porn Helpline operates similarly. These services know which platform has which form, what a given host actually responds to, and what the law is where you live. They handle this daily and you almost certainly do not.
Many jurisdictions also criminalise non-consensual distribution of intimate images, and legal options run in parallel to removal rather than instead of it. What is available depends entirely on where you and the uploader are, which is a question for a lawyer or the helpline, not an article.
What not to do
Do not contact the person who posted it. It rarely helps and it frequently produces more posts.
Do not delete your own copy of the original file. You may need it for a hash submission or a copyright claim.
Do not accept payment demands for removal. Sites built on that model reinstate content, and paying identifies you as someone who pays.
And do not treat one successful takedown as the end. Material spreads; the point of hash-matching is that it keeps working after you have stopped looking.
The part the old advice got wrong
The 2018 framing of this problem ended on prevention — be careful what you send. That advice is not useful to someone already in the situation, and it quietly relocates responsibility from the person who published without consent onto the person depicted.
The material was published by someone who chose to publish it. What you need is a route to removal, and there are now several. Work through them in order, keep the record, and use a helpline rather than carrying it alone.