“The price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.”

Robert H Jackson, famed jurist and chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.

A funny thing is happening in the second decade in the 21st century when it comes to free speech, whereas once many on the left protested for the right to say as they do, in 2015 two generations on, their moral successors now call at every opportunity for free speech to be stifled, particularly if that speech hurts, offends, or even god help “triggers” them.

The last cause célèbre among the chattering classes is so-called “revenge porn,” pornography shared online by former partners of relationships, typically in an act of vengeance to damage, or even shame the person naked, or undertaking sexual acts in the picture.

Google stepped into the fray on Friday when it announced that it would allow victims of revenge porn to have results of pictures removed from Google’s search results.

How this is to be administered isn’t clear, but it was received by near universal praise by the media, who sees the issue, like so many with a social justice view of the world in very simplistic terms: this is bad, something should be done about it.

No reasonable person could argue that revenge porn is a good thing, but Google acting to take down revenge porn not only just opened a Pandora’s box of free speech stifling, and will be near on impossible to administer, it will actually will do nothing to limit or prevent revenge porn.

Clusterf**k of administration

Google’s decision to allow users to remove revenge porn from its search results is like attempting to stop a stampeding wild horse with a feather: it won’t be effective.

Google hasn’t described how the takedown requests will be handled other than it will involve submitting details via a form, but presuming it follows form when it comes to a DMCA takedown request of copyrighted material, it will require the person making the request to nominate the site, or more specifically the exact URL or URL’s where the picture is hosted.

How will Google then confirm that the link sent is actually revenge porn? Clearly being hosted on a revenge porn site will be one giveaway, but the distribution of revenge porn is far wider than that.

There’s also the onward distribution of such pictures; should a forum with a picture of someone naked shared that started as revenge porn but has been shared around the internet so many times be punished because they host the picture?

And that’s even presuming that the victim making the complaint knows of all the sites hosting it.

The other possible way the takedowns could be administered is by automatically removing sites that host the picture (presumably the specific URL the picture appears) from the search results, but how does Google then confirm that the person making the complaint was the victim of revenge porn in the first place?

What if the person originally consented to having their naked picture or picture performing a sex act uploaded to the internet, or may have even uploaded it themselves? What about a former porn actress who regrets having worked in the industry and wants all evidence of their former work disappeared from Google?

Should Google be censoring images legally available on the internet, ones where the person in the pictures gave consent in the first place, but later had regrets?

Google can’t ascertain the validity of any removal request without human review, and automatic processing will immediately lead to abuse. Indeed, even the manual processing could be abused, because again how can Google properly ascertain that the person requesting the removal is legitimately a victim, versus say someone with later regrets for earlier actions?

Does that necessarily mean that it’s impossible for Google to get somewhere close to vetting these applications accurately? The answer is no, but the cost and time in doing so will never happen when all that is required to make a removal request is to submit details by a form.

Legal remedies

There are avenues for legal redress in place for revenge porn already, and while some of those in themselves can be abused, they have the far stronger backing of penalties for false claims, versus Google’s “fill in a form” process.

In the event that a pornographic picture posted to the internet is alleged to be revenge porn, copyright remains with the person who took the picture, and most revenge porn shots are selfies, meaning the person in the picture took the picture, and retains copyright.

Not only can, today, the person in the picture lodge a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint against the owner of the server of cloud service hosting the picture (although for United States servers, most legit Canadian and European service providers will usually respect one, or have alternative copyright complaint processes in place), here’s the big catch: the people in the pictures can DMCA Google NOW, THIS VERY MINUTE to have the same results removed from Google’s search results as well.

Music and record companies do it all the time with links to pirated content.

“Oh, but that’s hard” some might claim, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do a DMCA request, it takes about 30 seconds on Google to find a default DMCA request, fill in the details on the claim (including the URL’s) and send it off to Google.

The beauty of the DMCA system versus Google’s “fill in the form” system is that those making the complaint have to swear under law that the complaint is legit, and in the event it’s later found out to be false, legal penalties occur; again, it doesn’t stop false complaints, but it certainly may make some people think twice for making a false one.

Pictures taken by the former partner though do, admittedly, become more difficult to take down, as the copyright, in lieu of a written contract stating otherwise, remains with the person taking the picture.

Unless the person is tied to a chair or is forced into posing for the picture, consent is implied, and that, pray tell, means that the person who took the picture may be legally within their rights in distributing it, depending on the jurisdiction.

There are laws in some places, such as England and Wales, that even make this illegal, in that consent must be given for distribution as well, but that’s for the law to decide, NOT Google.

Google shouldn’t be making moral calls on pictures where the copyright owner distributed it, as it is primarily at its core a legal call, and wherein Google takes such pictures down where they might otherwise be legal, it also sees Google partaking in censorship.

Hypocrisy

Perhaps the most startling of all about Google’s decision to take down alleged revenge porn pictures is that it has decided to do so at the time that it continues to oppose the French Court decision, and therefore EU applicable decision, on the so-called “right to be forgotten.”

Under that legal ruling, anyone in the European Union can request that information about them listed in Google’s search results has to be removed upon request.

The latest news there is that France is now pushing to make that decision applicable across all Google domains globally, essentially meaning that a French court can dictate Google’s search results in the United States, Australia, or anywhere else.

Google is right in opposing it, but likewise it has for all intents and purposes just applied a more refined version of the same idea with its revenge porn removal request service.

You either believe in the right of Google to be a truly in-depth index of everything online, or one that can be dictated to by those who seek to remove things that embarrass them.

It’s beyond a hypocritical that Google is trying to have it both ways.

Again, very few would agree with the idea of revenge porn, it is via its very nature insidious and wrong, but Google shouldn’t be getting itself involved at all for all the very reasons listed in this post.

Image credit: deda_87/Flickr/CC by 2.0