Still, “anytime a company creates the potential for censorship, it should be very clear about the ground rules in order to avoid making its users frustrated and confused.” She suggests that Reddit send notices to users when their content is removed, and give them the opportunity to challenge the decision with evidence that it did not violate the site’s guidelines. Protecting user privacy is “a laudable goal,” Rowland says, and Reddit is within its rights to make decisions about the types of content it hosts on its platform. It remains unclear how Reddit will authenticate requests from victims (after all, anyone who objects to nudity or just wants to troll the site could file a complaint), and how it will deal with nude photos that are snapped outside of private moments-like when a drunk guy streaks at a public football game, sobers up, then wants all evidence of his jaunt erased. “Creating a takedown regime is often fraught, for reasons unrelated to the content,” says Lee Rowland, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. And Citron imagines that platforms like Reddit could better protect revenge porn victims by compiling private databases of nonconsensual porn-just like ones that already exist for child pornography-that are capable of recognizing offending images and removing them from view automatically.Ĭivil libertarians are also monitoring the situation, concerned that the anti-revenge-porn rule might be so broad that it ends up censoring lewd speech that doesn’t pose a serious privacy violation. Franks proposes a “victim-protective” consent form system, wherein “users must submit a signed consent form from the person depicted before they can post private explicit images” on a given website. And even Reddit, which Franks says is now “leaps and bounds beyond what most platforms are doing,” has room to improve. “Reddit’s move may have in fact been prompted in part by a desire to demonstrate that private companies can handle this problem themselves,” Franks says. Jackie Speier plans to introduce federal legislation aimed at cracking down on revenge porn-a move that has potentially deleterious implications for platform owners and operators. Franks cautions that Reddit’s announcement also functions as “a reminder of the industry’s likely hostility to government intervention on these kinds of issues.” It’s perhaps no coincidence that Reddit has finally altered its policies just as Rep.
Still, Reddit’s rule is far from a final solution to the revenge porn problem. Meanwhile, the many non-famous people who have been exposed on the site without their consent-the ones who don’t hold the rights to pictures of themselves, or who lack the lawyers to make a stink-were out of luck.
But after some of the famous women captured in the photos filed takedown requests under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, arguing that Reddit posters had no ownership over the content they were publishing-most were selfies, snapped and owned by the celebs themselves-Reddit admins publicly denounced the theft of the images and dutifully removed them, reducing the platform’s legal liability. Reddit’s administrators seemed unperturbed that their community had been converted, almost overnight, into the world’s highest-profile stolen-porn platform. But the event soon became closely associated with Reddit, the largest online platform on which Fappening hackers and supporters spread the photos. The Fappening, as it came to be called, was a collaborative effort between lecherous anonymous users from across the Web. Last August, private nude photos of dozens of female celebrities were hacked, stolen, and published online.
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