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ABSTRACT
Revenge porn involves publicly releasing pictures of a person’s sexual activity, along with the means to contact that person, to provoke widespread shaming. This paper analyzes the US-based revenge porn website MyEx.com through discourse, legal, and information network analyses. The paper explores how revenge porn is not only an instance of online sexual violence rooted in abjection but also symptomatic of a new political economy of subjectivity, where both the human-based and the automated, algorithm-based circulation of personal information are at the center of processes through which the self is seen and valued, both socially and economically, by others.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Jessica Carlascio for her insights into the economic dimension of online shaming. Kayla Koster and Andrea Luc provided invaluable research support. The anonymous reviewers provided much-needed suggestions.
Notes
1. Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
2. Carolin Gerlitz and Celia Lury, “Social Media and Self-Evaluating Assemblages: On Numbers, Orderings and Values,” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 15, no. 2 (2014): 174–88; Alison Hearn, “Structuring Feeling: Web 2.0, Online Ranking and Rating, and the Digital ‘Reputation’ Economy,” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organisation 10, no. 3/4 (2010): 421–38.
3. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978--1979, Reprint edition (New York: Picador, 2010); Maurizio Lazzarato, Révolutions du Capitalisme (Paris, France: Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond, 2004).
4. We follow a critical understanding of violence as the exercise of not only physical, but also verbal, psychological, emotional, social, informational, and affective power in order to cause significant harm. See, for instance, UN Broadband Commission for Digital Development Working Group on Broadband and Gender, “Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls : A World-Wide Wake-Up Call,” United Nations, http://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2015/9/cyber-violence-against-women-and-girls#view (accessed August 23, 2016).
5. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 1988); Maurizio Lazzarato, Révolutions du Capitalisme.
6. See, for instance, Dewey Cornell and Susan P. Limber, “Law and Policy on the Concept of Bullying at School,” American Psychologist 70, no. 4 (2015): 333–43; Lyrissa Lidsky and Andrea Pinzon Garcia, “How Not to Criminalize Cyberbullying,” Missouri Law Review 77, no. 3 (2013): 693–726.
7. Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
8. Mary Anne Franks, “Drafting an Effective ‘Revenge Porn’ Law: A Guide for Legislators,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, August 17, 2015), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2468823.
9. At least 30 legal articles have been recently published on revenge porn, most of them since 2014. See, for instance, Danielle Keats Citron and Mary Anne Franks, “Criminalizing Revenge Porn,” Wake Forest Law Review 49 (2014): 345; Danielle Keats Citron, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Scott R. Stroud, “The Dark Side of the Online Self: A Pragmatist Critique of the Growing Plague of Revenge Porn,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 29, no. 3 (2014): 168–83.
10. The site is registered to a nonexistent Netherlands company, and claims the jurisdiction of the British Virgin Islands in its Terms of Service. Revenge porn activist Adam Steinbaugh claims that the site is run by Americans (Hill, 2014).
11. Adam Steinbaughs, comment on “Revenge Porn Site myex.com Sued For Copyright Infringement,” Adam Steinbaugh’s Blog, comment posted March 7, 2014, http://adamsteinbaugh.com/2014/03/07/revenge-porn-site-myex-com-sued-for-copyright-infringement/; Kashmir Hill, “This Guy Hunts Down The Men Behind Revenge Porn Websites,” Forbes, April 23, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/04/23/this-guy-hunts-down-the-men-behind-revenge-porn-websites/.
12. For examples of long-lasting online shaming campaigns, see Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015).
13. Mary Anne Franks, “The Lawless Internet? Myths and Misconceptions About CDA Section 230,” The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-anne-franks/section-230-the-lawless-internet_b_4455090.html (accessed December 18, 2013).
14. Sarah Kaplan, “‘Revenge Porn’ Web Site Creator Convicted; He Victimized Thousands of Women,” The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/02/03/revenge-porn-web-site-creator-convicted-victimized-thousands-of-women/ (accessed February 3, 2015).
15. Suzanne Van Arsdale, “Unwanted Exposure; Civil and Criminal Liability for Revenge Porn Hosts and Posters,” Jolt Digest, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/privacy/unwanted-exposure-civil-and-criminal-liability-for-revenge-porn-hosts-and-posters (accessed May 28, 2013).
16. Adam Steinbaugh, comment on “Meet Hunter Taylor, The Man Reportedly Behind Revenge Porn Site Texxxan,” Adam Steinbaugh’s Blog About Law and Technology, comment posted on February 11, 2013, http://adamsteinbaugh.com/2013/02/11/meet-hunter-taylor-reportedly-behind-revenge-porn-site-texxxa/.
17. Joseph Cox, “Revenge Porn Returns to the Dark Web,” Motherboard, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/revenge-porn-returns-to-the-dark-web (accessed June 19, 2015).
18. Daniel Kreps, “Revenge-Porn Site Owner Hunter Moore Pleads Guilty, Faces Prison Time,” Rolling Stone, http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/revenge-porn-site-owner-hunter-moore-pleads-guilty-faces-prison-time-20150220 (accessed February 20, 2015); Danielle Citron, “Ding Dong, Revenge Porn King Hunter Moore Is Going To Jail,” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/daniellecitron/2015/02/18/ding-dong-revenge-porn-king-hunter-moore-is-going-to-jail/ (accessed February 18, 2015).
19. Kaplan, “‘Revenge Porn’ Web Site Creator Convicted”; Alex Morris, “Hunter Moore: The Most Hated Man on the Internet,” Rolling Stone, http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-most-hated-man-on-the-internet-20121113 (accessed November 13, 2012).
20. PCWorld, “US Man Pleads No Contest to Operating Revenge Porn Site,” PCWorld, http://www.pcworld.com/article/2920812/us-man-pleads-no-contest-to-operating-revenge-porn-site.html (accessed May 8, 2015).
21. Larry Gordon, “Oklahoma Man Arrested in Alleged ‘Revenge Porn’ Extortions,” Los Angeles Times, 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/2014/feb/14/local/la-me-ln-porn-extortion-20140214 (accessed February 14, 2014).
22. Federal Trade Commission, “Website Operator Banned from the ‘Revenge Porn’ Business After FTC Charges He Unfairly Posted Nude Photos,” Federal Trade Commission, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2015/01/website-operator-banned-revenge-porn-business-after-ftc-charges (accessed January 29, 2015); AP, “Revenge Porn Site Operator Sentenced To 18 Years,” The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/03/kevin-bollaert-revenge-porn-sentenced_n_7002364.html (accessed April 3, 2015).
23. Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. Macgregor Wise, Culture and Technology: A Primer, Second Edition (New York: Peter Lang, 2014); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social-An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
24. Samantha Bates, “Revenge Porn and Mental Health: A Qualitative Analysis of the Mental Health Effects of Revenge Porn on Female Survivors,” Feminist Criminology, published online before print June 20, 2016; Franks, “Drafting an Effective ‘Revenge Porn’ Law.”
25. Alec McHoul et al., A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
26. Richard Rogers, Digital Methods (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013).
28. The percentages of female and male victims on myex.com, based on the total number of posts as of Oct. 29, 2015, were respectively 84.5 percent and 15.5 percent.
29. Leora Tanenbaum, I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (New York: Harper Perennial, 2015).
30. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, ed. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 86–111.
31. Annmarie Chiarini, “I Was a Victim of Revenge Porn. I Don’t Want Anyone Else to Face This,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/19/revenge-porn-victim-maryland-law-change (accessed November 19, 2013); Ruth Styles, “Revenge Porn Victims Tell of Their Humiliation and Anger,” Mail Online, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3200674/Revenge-porn-victims-tell-humiliation-anger.html (accessed August 17, 2015).
32. Bates, “Revenge Porn and Mental Health.”
33. See Stroud, “The Dark Side of the Online Self.”
34. The site notes the number of views that a particular image has received, which is typically many hundred times more frequent than the number of commenters.
35. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” History and Theory 24, no. 3 (October 1, 1985): 247–72.
36. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
37. Liberty Zabala and R. Stickney, “‘Revenge Porn’ Defendant Sentenced to 18 Years,” NBC 7 San Diego, http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Kevin-Bollaert-Revenge-Porn-Sentencing-San-Diego-298603981.html (accessed April 3, 2015).
38. Franks, “Drafting an Effective ‘Revenge Porn’ Law.”
39. Olivia Wilson, “Revenge Porn Is More Than a Violation of Privacy It Is Digital Sexual Assault,” The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-wilson/revenge-porn-is-more-than_b_7641876.html (accessed October 30, 2015).
40. Franks, “Drafting an Effective ‘Revenge Porn’ Law”; Carissima Mathen, “Crowdsourcing Sexual Objectification,” Laws 3, no. 3 (August 6, 2014): 529–52; Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000).
41. Laurie Segall, “Revenge Porn Hacker: ‘Scary How Quickly I Would Drop My Morals for so Little,’” CNNMoney, http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/26/technology/charlie-evens-revenge-porn-hacker/index.html (accessed April 26, 2015).
42. Elaine Craig, Troubling Sex: Towards a Legal Theory of Sexual Integrity (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2012).
43. For a list of the criminal statutes in US states to date, see http://www.endrevengeporn.org/revenge-porn-laws/. These statutes have been criticized as infringing on freedom of expression and are subject to court challenges. Joe Mullin, “Arizona Makes Deal with ACLU, Won’t Enforce Bad Law on ‘Revenge Porn’,” ArsTechnica, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/arizona-makes-deal-with-aclu-wont-enforce-bad-law-on-revenge-porn/ (accessed July 12, 2015); ACLU, “Free Speech and Media Groups Applaud Governor’s Veto of Overbroad “Revenge Porn” Bill,” ACLU, https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech-and-media-groups-applaud-governors-veto-overbroad-revenge-porn-bill (accessed June 21, 2016). Some legal scholars have asserted ways to make these laws more compliant with the First Amendment; see, for instance, John A. Humbach, “The Constitution and Revenge Porn” Pace Law Review 35, no. 1 (2015): 1–46. A useful debate about revenge porn laws took place between legal scholars Eric Goldman and Mary Ann Franks, setting out two strongly distinct views on the topic. Eric Goldman, “What Should We Do About Revenge Porn Sites Like Texxxan?” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericgoldman/2013/01/28/what-should-we-do-about-revenge-porn-sites-like-texxxan/#145f487b4177 (accessed January 28, 2013); and Mary Anne Franks, “Adventures in Victim Blaming: Revenge Porn Edition,” Concurring Opinions, http://concurringopinions.com/archives/2013/02/adventures-in-victim-blaming-revenge-porn-edition.html (accessed February 1, 2013).
44. Department of Justice Government of Canada, “Department of Justice—Cyberbullying and the Non-Consensual Distribution of Intimate Images,” Department of Justice Government of Canada, http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/other-autre/cndii-cdncii/index.html (accessed June 2013).
45. A notable exception to this exclusive focus on the OP is a recently introduced federal bill, the Intimate Privacy Protection Act of 2016, which would remove Section 230 immunity from website operators who intentionally promote or solicit nonconsensually posted intimate images. H.R. 5896, 114th Congress (2015-2016), introduced July 14, 2016.
46. Clay Calvert, “Revenge Porn and Freedom of Expression: Legislative Pushback to an Online Weapon of Emotional and Reputational Destruction,” Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal 24, no. 3 (January 1, 2014): 673.
47. Supra note 45.
48. According to screen grabs from the Wayback Machine, the “Remove My Name” link became a feature some time in 2013, and until some time in 2014 linked to a website called Reputation Guard. The link between myex.com and Reputationguard is also mentioned in Minc, 2014.
49. Comments by “Casey” on each posted profile can be seen on archived versions of the site on the Internet archive the Wayback Machine.
50. PC World, “US Man Pleads No Contest to Operating Revenge Porn Site,” PCWorld, http://www.pcworld.com/article/2920812/us-man-pleads-no-contest-to-operating-revenge-porn-site.html (accessed May 8, 2015).
51. Ibid.
54. The previous practice of linking to a fee-based reputation defense service is discussed here: http://www.defamationremovallaw.com/2014/02/28/permanently-remove-posts-revenge-porn-websites-like-myex-com/. The current form is here: http://www.myex.com/remove-your-name/.
55. http://www.myex.com/contact-us/; 17 U.S.C. § 512.
56. Steinbaugh, “Revenge Porn Site myex.com Sued For Copyright Infringement”; Adam Steimbaugh, comment on “Google Settles Revenge Porn Copyright Case, Yahoo! And myex.com Are Dismissed,” posted on October 30, 2015, http://adamsteinbaugh.com/2014/10/22/google-settles-revenge-porn-copyright-case-yahoo-and-myex-com-are-dismissed/.
57. Camille Dodero, “Hunter Moore Makes a Living Screwing You,” Village Voice, http://www.villagevoice.com/news/hunter-moore-makes-a-living-screwing-you-6435187 (accessed April 4, 2012).
58. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics; Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism, trans. Kristina Lebedeva (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotexte, 2010).
59. Pasquale, The Black Box Society.
60. Bates, “Revenge Porn and Mental Health.”
61. See, for instance, GoDaddy.com, LLC v. Hollie Toups, et al., Court of Appeals of Texas, Beaumont, No. 09-13-00285-CV (April 10, 2014). Online: http://caselaw.findlaw.com/tx-court-of-appeals/1663288.html.
62. European Commission, “Factsheet on the ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Ruling C-131/12,” European Commission, http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets/factsheet_data_protection_en.pdf (accessed June 15, 2015).
63. Farhad Manjoo, “‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Online Could Spread,” The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/06/technology/personaltech/right-to-be-forgotten-online-is-poised-to-spread.html (accessed August 5, 2015).
64. Sophie Curtis, “EU ‘Right to Be Forgotten’: One Year on,” The Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/11599909/EU-right-to-be-forgotten-one-year-on.html (accessed May 13, 2015); Amit Singhal, comment on “‘Revenge Porn’ and Search,” Google Public Policy Blog, comment accessed June 19, 2015, http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2015/06/revenge-porn-and-search.html.
65. Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, “Google Cracks down on Revenge Porn,” Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, http://www.cybercivilrights.org/google/ (accessed June 19, 2015).
66. Jacqueline Beauchere, “‘Revenge Porn:’ Putting Victims Back in Control,” Microsoft on the Issues, http://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2015/07/22/revenge-porn-putting-victims-back-in-control/ (accessed July 22, 2015).
67. Emma Holten et al., “Someone Stole Naked Pictures of Me. This Is What I Did about It—Video,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2015/jan/21/naked-pictures-this-is-what-i-did-revenge-porn-emma-holten-video (accessed January 21, 2015).
68. See for example Reputation.com and DMCA Defender (http://dmcadefender.com/victim-of-revenge-porn/).
69. See, for instance, Reputation Tower (http://reputationtower.com/myex-com-post-removal/).
70. Ann Bartow, “Internet Defamation as Profit Center: The Monetization of Online Harassment,” Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 32, no. 2 (2009), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1447472.
71. Sarah Jeong, “Hunter Moore Revenge Porn Victim Got a Whopping $145.70 in Restitution,” Motherboard, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hunter-moore-revenge-porn-victim-got-a-whopping-14570-in-restitution (accessed March 31, 2016); Holten et al., “Someone Stole Naked Pictures of Me.”
72. Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd, “Networked Privacy: How Teenagers Negotiate Context in Social Media,” New Media & Society 16, no. 17 (2014): 1051–67.
73. danah boyd and Karen Levy, “Networked Rights and Networked Harms,” paper presented at Privacy Law School Conference (June 6, 2014) and Data & Discrimination (May 14, 2014). On file with the authors.
74. Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford Law Books, 2009).
75. Lisa M. Austin, “Privacy and Private Law: The Dilemma of Justification,” McGill Law Journal 55, no. 2 (2010): 165–210.
76. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Sarah Friedland, “Habits of Leaking: Of Sluts and Network Cards,” Differences 26, no. 2 (2015): 1–28.