The Internet is the greatest innovation in human history, and it has opened the gates of unlimited knowledge to the world in a way never before realized. But with the incredible benefits of the Internet have come tremendous drawbacks. Material once impossible for most to access, both enlightening and horrific, is now available at the click of a button.
One of the most terrible problems that has gone largely unnoticed is the growth of videos of women being sexually abused, a phenomenon that the world’s largest and most powerful search engines, including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing, are profiting off of — because of the increased traffic the videos bring to their sites — and doing not enough to solve.
Criminals videotape themselves sexually abusing women, sometimes violently, and post their videos on pornography websites that allow users to anonymously, or by using an alias, submit material. Many of the women in these videos are heavily intoxicated or drugged, and almost all the women are unconscious. The descriptions of the videos, submitted by the users themselves, claim to show sexual abuse. Although these videos are often in violation of many pornography websites’ terms of use, the porn websites don’t seem to be doing anything to remove these videos, some of which have been viewed more than a million times.
Search engines provide access to the material, both in regular search results and in the “video” search results section, in the same way they provide access to other forms of content, and they do so knowing the material displayed shows women getting sexually abused.
Search engines, such as Google, specifically forbid this kind of material in their terms of use, but they don’t appear to be doing enough to stop millions of people from using their sites to find and watch videos of rape. The search results themselves even show preview pictures of the videos, which often display disturbing pictures of the victims right on the search engine’s website. This means users don’t even need to go to pornography websites to see naked images of these women.
The videos are not difficult to find; users do not even need to use graphic search terms. For instance, a search in Google’s search engine for the terms “abuse of passed out girl” will show as one of the top results a video of a young woman being sexually abused while she is passed out. The video, which is titled “Abuse of passed out girl,” has over 3.7 million views.
Several months ago, I reached out to the world’s largest search engines to inform them of these terrible videos and request a comment. Representatives for all three websites decided not to comment, and none of the videos I found several months ago have been removed.
In June, Google announced it would launch a program to help people request to have pornography videos posted of themselves without their permission be removed. While this is definitely a step in the right direction, it falls far short of good policy. Users are only able to have videos removed if they find the material themselves, which is unlikely to occur in many cases, and Google’s new policy does not appear to do anything to remove obviously illicit videos, such as homemade rape videos.
Some legal experts believe search engines such as Google may be in violation of federal laws that prohibit the distribution of “obscene” material.
Michael Whisonant, an attorney at the Jaffe, Hanle, Whisonant & Knight law firm in Birmingham, Alabama, says search engines that show pictures of women being raped are at risk of violating federal law and should consider revising their policies to ensure they don’t find themselves in legal trouble.
Mary Anne Franks, Ph.D., the legislative and tech policy director at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and a professor at the University of Miami School of Law, says although scholars disagree on exactly what constitutes “obscenity,” it’s possible federal obscenity laws could be used in this case. However, Franks is concerned that because obscenity laws have been used in the past to inappropriately censor material, “we would be better off with sharper legal concepts that are less vulnerable to overreach and misuse.”
“Updating our voyeurism laws for the 21st century would be a good start, as would be recognizing crimes such as the nonconsensual distribution of sexually explicit material,” said Franks.
In general, people and businesses should be free to operate, even when that means acting in ways that others consider to be immoral. In no case, however, should anyone be allowed to profit off of others’ loss of liberty, and that’s exactly what’s happening here when search engines receive revenues from visitors who come to their sites to find videos of women being raped.
It’s time to call for search engines to radically reform their policies regarding these videos or to find websites that aren’t willing to engage in these kinds of irresponsible business practices.
Justin Haskins (Jhaskins@heartland.org) is editor of The Heartland Institute, a national nonprofit think tank headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois. You can follow him @TheNewRevere.