First, for those lucky enough not to know, “revenge porn” is the term used to describe the practice (usually by disgruntled ex-boyfriends) of distributing nude or sexually explicit images of people via the Internet without permission. Once out there, as we all know, images and videos can end up anywhere, copied and redistributed by anyone; and this includes websites designed specifically to profit from traffic drawn to revenge porn. In some cases, owners of these sites have even extorted money from victims in exchange for removing their likenesses from these sites. Nobody writing editorials or legal opinions on the matter defends the practice itself. We all agree that posting these intimate images without permission and violating that trust is a despicable practice. Where opinions diverge is what to do about it from a legal perspective.
Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA) is the lead sponsor of a bill that would make revenge porn a federal crime in the U.S., and the bill is set to be introduced in the House in coming weeks. While some states have passed laws prohibiting revenge porn, and other existing laws already criminalize several of the actions required to perpetrate revenge porn (e.g. hacking or stealing data), the rationale for making revenge porn itself a federal crime is apparently Sec. 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 provides safe harbors for site owners, who cannot be held liable for the actions of third parties using their sites. These safe harbors do not apply to liability for federal crimes such as child pornography and copyright infringement; so enacting Speier’s bill would not only provide the grounds for prosecuting the individual perpetrators of revenge porn, but it would provide a legal basis for prosecuting site owners anywhere in the U.S. that host revenge porn. On the other hand, some concerns have been raised that if Speier’s bill were to become law, it would jeopardize free speech by circumventing the intent of Sec. 230 of the CDA.
Last April, Mike Masnick at Techdirt wrote a post that dispassionately suggests this bill could undermine safe harbors and foster censorship of legal and sanctioned material. To quote:
“By spreading liability, you guarantee over-censorship. It’s easy for people who are narrowly focused on a single issue to not recognize the wider impact that issue may have. Trying to accurately describe what “revenge porn” is for the sake of criminalizing its posting, will almost certainly have chilling effects on third parties and undermine the very intent of the CDA’s Section 230.”
I don’t think Masnick is quite right to say that it is hard to describe what revenge porn is. I defined it above, he defined it in his post, others have defined it in other editorials. Admittedly, though, revenge porn is a problem different from child pornography, which is addressed simply by making all sexually explicit material involving minors illegal to produce, distribute, or possess. But in the world of adults, how does one distinguish between an amateur nude shared by permission and one distributed without permission; and then where do we draw the lines of responsibility for that distribution given the chaotic nature of digital reproduction and distribution? Still, it seems as though fears of “guaranteed,” rampant censorship are a bit overwrought in this context.
With regard to criminalizing revenge porn, the results I imagine we want ought to be legislatively achievable without chilling free speech. We should want to prosecute the individual who initiated the unauthorized distribution, and we’d want to prosecute the site owner who knowingly and specifically trades in revenge porn. And it is not clear why this narrowly-focused goal must lead to censorship anymore than statutes criminalizing child porn.
The concern Masnick and others appear to be raising is that innocent site owners, fearful of criminal liability, will be motivated to over-censor their own sites through TOS policies, and that will have a chilling effect on speech. But this seems reactionary, given the very specific nature of the crime. For instance, one way to indemnify site owners in this case would be to create a DMCA-like provision that enables a victim of revenge porn to demand removal of her/his private images and gives the site owner no option to refuse. If the site owner complies with the request, no liability should exist. At best, victims of revenge porn should have as easy a mechanism as possible for removal of the unauthorized content; at worst, if the claimant isn’t really a victim of revenge but simply wants her photos removed, can anyone rationally claim free speech will suffer from this “abuse” of the new law? In such a case, she may be falsely accusing an individual of a crime, which is a serious offense, but not a First Amendment issue. Regardless, the claimant should have to be the victim herself, so abusing the law to chill speech seems unlikely.
Another factor to consider with proposed criminalization of anything is whether or not the law would act as a deterrent. Unfortunately, criminal penalties often do not deter criminal behavior; but in this case, I suspect making revenge porn a federal crime would have demonstrative mitigating effect, if, in fact, most of the sources of these images are grumpy ex-boyfriends acting rashly. Criminals with profit or survival motivations and individuals with various psychoses are not easily deterred by the threat of prosecution, but regular guys just being stupid often are deterred by the law. And in this regard, criminalizing revenge porn is an important step toward a more enlightened and civilized, digital future. It has become too easy to cause harm to someone by remote control, cloaked in anonymity, and normalizing this behavior is a betrayal of the original goals of the Internet.
Interestingly enough, last month, Google announced and then retracted new policy for its blog-hosting site Blogger that would appear to have censored legal and consensual, sexual content. Originally meant to take effect on the 23rd of this month, Google stated that sexually explicit material would not be allowed on Blogger unless it provides “public benefit, for example in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts.” I have to say that’s some rather subjective language coming from a company that repeatedly states it “cannot be responsible for policing the Internet” with regard to criminal or offensive activities. Ever since the Deep Throat case, nothing in the law even presumes to make such distinctions with regard to censorship of explicit material, but Google’s TOS almost did, if it were not for the backlash from thousands of users, particularly those who post sexually explicit articles, photos, and videos. One of these bloggers, Zoe Margolis, even used the words “it breaks the Internet” to describe Google’s proposed policy to make all sex-oriented blogs private rather than public. Was Google motivated to change the Blogger TOS in anticipation of the success of Congresswoman Speier’s proposed bill, or was the company’s sudden priggishness motivated by some other factor? Margolis suggests a financial incentive — that Google didn’t want to be hosting “free porn,” and this ought to at least give my friends with copyright interests reason to chuckle at that particular hypocrisy.
Regardless, I think the point in this context is that the amount of “censorship” on the web is a dynamic (dare we say evolving?) process that is driven as much by the business interests of the major site owners as by any particular statutes. While I agree that free speech must always be a foundation of these debates, I believe it is incumbent upon us as a decent society to address the fact that new technologies create new ways for bad actors to rather casually cause great harm to individuals who cannot defend themselves. And this is hardly the first time we’ve had to seek a balance between liberty and justice. Avoiding criminalization of a behavior like revenge porn for fear of some very improbable forms of censorship sounds like a cop out to me.