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.

*Winner of: (1) Top Journal Article of the Year Award from the Communication Ethics Division of the National Communication Association (2014). (2) the Ellen A. Wartella Distinguished Research Award from the Moody College of Communication, University of Texas at Austin (2014)* This study seeks to understand and critique the growing online trend of “revenge porn,” or the intentional embarrassment of identifiable individuals through the posting of nude images online. This posting of intimate pictures, often done out of motives of revenge for perceived relational scorn, is enhanced by the varying levels of online anonymity. Using the theoretical framework of John Dewey’s pragmatism, this study both analyzes this understudied but complex new problem precipitated by the conditions of the online self and establishes the groundwork for the use of pragmatist ethics in other areas of communication ethics.

Millions of people around the world, most of them women, have been victims of revenge porn and have suffered intense pain and distress as a result. By 2021, almost all US states had criminalized revenge porn, defining it primarily as an infringement of privacy, as obscenity or as harassment. US courts have recently considered the constitutionality of criminalizing revenge porn in view of the potential conflict with freedom of speech. Contrary to the courts' decisions, we argue that revenge porn is a sex offense and therefore justifies limiting the disseminator's freedom of speech to a significant degree. Empirical evidence indicates that victims experience revenge porn as an erasure of their personal autonomy, one that radically disrupts their lives, alters their sense of self and identity, and dramatically affects their relationship with themselves and with others. Insofar as the rationale of freedom of speech relies on the protection of autonomy, the protection of the disseminator's autonomy should not be at the expense of erasing the victim's autonomy. Thus, our argument highlights the necessity for US state legislators to redefine the boundaries of the revenge porn offense accordingly.

The introduction of s 33 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, criminalising the disclosure of private sexual images, has been seen as a welcome step forward for curbing this abuse of privacy and the harmful effects it has on victims. However, while s 33 sidesteps any reference to ‘revenge pornography’, as the phenomenon has been termed in popular vernacular, little attention has been paid to the way in which narratives of revenge implicitly underpin and imbue the new offence, particularly its specific intent requirement. We argue this has serious implications for the treatment of s 33 offences in the courts and for sentencing. Drawing on cross-disciplinary conceptualisations of revenge, its recent criminal-legal history, and examples of media and parliamentary rhetoric, we claim that despite innumerable attempts to turn debate on disclosure of private sexual images towards consent, harm and privacy, there lurks within these discourses an assumption that the victim must have ...

This paper makes an attempt to explain the construction of a newly developed genre called revenge porn flourishing in new media. The study analyzes the patterns of production and display of revenge porn content as well as the mechanisms of the site that archives such materials. The analyses reveal that young women are more frequently exposed in the revenge porn website. Biased and sexualized representation of their body coupled with misogynistic labeling present them as objects of pleasure and desire in front of a majority of hetero sexual male audience who further objectify the victim by making lustful and/or derogative comments . The results of this study suggest that the development of such a genre cannot be attributed only to liberatory and/or victimizing effects of the electronic space. Rather, social power structures based on discourses like gender, heterosexuality and capitalist patriarchy that exploit the surveillance mechanism of the internet are significantly influencing both individual uses of the internet as well as its apparatus and technologies. These are the major forces contributing to the institutionalization and commercialization of revenge porn in new media. This is a case study based investigation that uses both content analysis and discourse analysis as methods to interpret the revenge porn genre in new media.

In a time of rapid technological advancement and the social networked society, the current legal standards put in place to protect our personal information and online data are becoming increasingly archaic. Even more dangerous for our privacy is the rate at which these standards are able to evolve, which is often far too slow or not at all. A rising threat to privacy due to the law‘s inability to keep pace with technology, especially for young digital natives, is intimate private made public content, better known as ‘revenge porn.’

Among many forms of abuse of privacy in the cyberspace and social media networks, particular attention is given to the so-called cyber misogyny. It refers to the existence of deeply rooted prejudices against women and encompasses various forms of gender- based hatred, harassment and violence against women that occur in a virtual (cyber) space. The subject of this paper is an analysis of emerging forms of cyber misogyny, particularly focusing on one of its most widespread forms: revenge porn. Through revenge porn in the cyberspace, misogyny can be manifested through publishing someone?s intimate photos, that is, photos of their intimate private life or sexually explicit photos and videos. In all these cases, publications in cyberspace or social media occur without the knowledge, willingness or consent of the photographed person. The purpose behind such activity is to shame and/or humiliate the victim by causing her pain and moral suffering for reasons of revenge. The anonymity of the...

The non-consensual distribution of intimate images, also known as ‘revenge pornography’ has been increasingly identified as a significant and serious problem, warranting substantial legislative reform and non-legal remedies. Yet little information is available to date on these types of behaviours, or the extent of harms caused to victims. What is clear is that this form of image-based sexual exploitation is occurring globally, and research is needed to assist in the development of: concise laws, training for criminal justice authorities, social workers and victim advocates, and education and prevention campaigns, in order to respond effectively to the victims and perpetrators of these harms.