Google is finally going to start removing content associating with revenge porn, back in March Twitter updated its TOS banning such content from their service. There have been a few high profile cases with Hunter Moore and his website IsAnyoneUp.com being the most famous. Moore was eventually arrested. From Ars Technica:
On Wednesday, Hunter Moore, 28, the notorious founder and operator of revenge porn site IsAnyoneUp.com, pleaded guilty [PDF] to unauthorized access to a computer, aiding and abetting unauthorized access of a computer, and identity theft. The charges each carry a maximum penalty of two to five years in jail, though Moore will not be sentenced until a later date.
Moore’s IsAnybodyUp.com became hugely popular for posting nude and sexually explicit photos of people without their permission, and it spawned copycat revenge porn sites like Craig Brittain’s IsAnybodyDown.com and Kevin Bollaert’s ugotposted.com. (Brittain was banned from posting any more nude photos of people without their explicit permission in a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in January, while Bollaert was found guilty earlier this month of identity theft and extortion.) Moore’s site at one point allegedly received over 30 million page views and was bringing in about $10,000 in ad revenue per month.
Bridey Heing wrote on Hello Giggles:
Google has just announced a new policy that will hopefully make revenge porn much harder to access. The tech giant will no longer list revenge porn sites in their searches, and victims of the awful violation of privacy can request that sites be added to the list. Although it doesn’t remove content from the Internet, having these sites off of Google’s searches will be a huge step forward in keeping the images and videos posted there from reaching a wide audience.
“Our 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—predominantly women,” the company’s senior vice president of Google Search said in a statement.
Read the full story on Hello Giggles
The authority of the ‘Big G’ cannot be contested on the World Wide Web, at least for now. I’m in full support of Google’s action.