Revenge porn is among the , and thatās saying a lot. The images ā typically private, sexually explicit photos published by an ex ā arenāt just briefly humiliating; they sometimes dominate the search results for a personās name.
People have engaged in fruitless legal manoeuvres to get the images removed and have even tried to change their identities to escape the photos or videos.
Sites like and have tried to ban revenge porn on their platforms. Governments are trying to find ways to and those posting the images.
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These are all good steps, but, as with all things online, the content can be shifted around, with new platforms popping up, often outside the US, making prosecution difficult. If the images can be found, the harassers achieve their purpose.
Image takedown
On Friday, Google took a big step toward stopping that. that in the coming weeks, it will remove these images from search results when the person in the photo requests it.
In a statement Google said: āOur philosophy has always been that Search should reflect the whole web. But revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims ā predominantly women. So going forward, weāll honour requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results.ā
Google plays a critical role in providing the world with access to information. If a page doesnāt appear in Googleās search results, it becomes very hard to find. Yes, there are other search engines, but Google is the most popular, . Its move to remove revenge porn images isnāt just effective because of its market share; it also throws down a gauntlet for other search engines, which must follow suit or make an argument that revenge porn deserves to be accessible.
Importantly, Google is recognising the line between free speech and a right to protect oneās deeply personal information. This isnāt the same thing as Europeās āright to be forgottenā. Google already removes pages with other sensitive personal data, like social security numbers and credit card numbers.
Slippery slope?
Removing nude photos is very much in the spirit of the existing policy. At the same time, it is affirming that people deserve control over these intensely private images of themselves.
The biggest tech companies, like Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, have a lot of control over what we can access online and how we see it. This is a new type of influence, and as a society we are still grappling with the implications. What if Facebook uses its to swing an election? Or, in this case, what if a search engine refuses to give us the information we are searching for? Itās easy to think up dire implications that could follow this precedent, but that doesnāt mean that we are starting down a slippery slope.
Google has made a moral decision against revenge porn and put its substantial weight behind that. It shows how tech companies can help stamp out a scourge, and this move should be part of the ongoing conversation about an open internet and the right to control our personal information.
Google effectively summed up the policy and its impact in its public statement: āWe know this wonāt solve the problem of revenge porn ā we arenāt able, of course, to remove these images from the websites themselves ā but we hope that honoring peopleās requests to remove such imagery from our search results can help.ā Letās hope it does.
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