It appears that voyeurs and spurned lovers won’t be able to count on Facebook to upload and share any of their ill-gotten sexually explicit content.
Antigone Davis, the head of Facebook’s global safety department, confirmed Oct. 20 that the company is throwing its support behind efforts to criminalize acts of revenge porn.
Davis told reporters that the social media company does “not tolerate revenge porn on Facebook, and we have reporting folks that do allow people to report and to take it down, and we do support the criminalization for people who post that non-consensual content.”
She cautiously stopped short of endorsing any specific legislation, saying that since she had not seen any specific bill, she “was loath to comment on the federal legislation,” according to The Hill.
Facebook joins other popular websites in fighting back against the dissemination of nude or sexual photos without an individual’s consent, namely Pornhub, 4chan, and Reddit. (RELATED: California Target Blasts Dirty Porn Over Intercom Causing Little Boys To Cry [VIDEO])
Pornhub, one of the most trafficked porn sites on the internet, added a page to their site Oct. 14 that allows any user to flag content that has been posted without a subject’s permission.
In a June 19 post on Google’s Public Policy blog, the company stated that “going forward, we’ll honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results. This is a narrow and limited policy, similar to how we treat removal requests for other highly sensitive personal information, such as bank account numbers and signatures, that may surface in our search results.” (RELATED: Microsoft Lays Off Thousands While Demanding More H1-B Visas.)
Following in the footsteps of Google, Microsoft also announced Jul. 22 that the company would be filtering out links to revenge porn from their search engine, Bing. “Microsoft will remove links to photos and videos from search results in Bing,” the statement read “and remove access to the content itself when shared on OneDrive or Xbox Live, when we are notified by a victim.” (RELATED: Google Decides What Is Fact In New Search Results Ranking System.)
According to the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, currently 26 states have laws penalizing acts of revenge porn. California Attorney General Kamala Harris recently announced on Oct. 14 the creation of an online resource for victims to specifically combat instances of revenge porn. (RELATED: Revenge Porn Is On Government Radar Again In California.)
The Hill reports that California Rep. [crscore]Jackie Speier[/crscore] has taken the lead to introduce revenge porn legislation, but has experienced numerous delays in its creation.
The proposed bill would make posting explicit images or videos without consent a federal crime. The companies where these images are uploaded would then be held accountable if, after receiving a take down request, they do not remove the images in a timely manner or if they refuse outright. The bill would not penalize sites if they are unaware the content has been posted.
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