Most of the content on the Internet is enough to ruin your mood, even if it is not about you. The First Amendment protects people’s rights to say and show many unpleasant things, but posting threats against real people counts as harassment. Intimate images of real people, the images that the subjects only meant for a small number of people to see, are an especially insidious form of cyber harassment. Now that smartphones are ubiquitous, it is easy to take intimate images of yourself and send them to your partner without anyone else seeing the images or knowing that they exist. A bad breakup can turn those images into a weapon, and too many vengeful exes shared sexy photos of the one that got away.  Where is the line between free speech and revenge porn? A recently enacted federal law addresses malicious sharing of sexually suggestive content, but it leaves legal gray areas. If you are being accused of sharing revenge porn, but you believe that you were within your rights to share the content you shared, contact a Tulsa sex crimes lawyer.

Federal Law Prohibits Non-Consensual Sharing of Intimate Images and Pornographic Deepfakes

Earlier this month, President Trump signed the Take It Down Act into law. The new law is the result of a bipartisan effort to prohibit the sharing of sexually explicit content without the consent of the people depicted in the content. The original intent of the law was to prohibit the posting of “revenge porn,” where someone sends intimate images of himself or herself to his or her partner, and after the couple breaks up, the former partner who received the images shares them online or sends them to third parties to harm the reputation of the ex who sent them.

Revenge porn is only one aspect of sexual cyber harassment, though. It is bad enough when someone shares an image of you without your consent, but it is worse when the content your ex or enemy is sharing does not include you at all, even though the sharer of the content says it does, and it looks enough like you that people are likely to believe the sharer. Deepfake technology can create realistic likenesses, and the Take It Down Act also prohibits the non-consensual sharing of artificially generated pornographic content.

Critics of the Take It Down Act agree with the goal of protecting people who shared images of themselves with the reasonable belief that these would be kept private, but they fear that the law could be used to criminalize protected speech. Whether content is pornographic depends on how much of a prude you are, and one can easily use accusations of obscenity to target one’s enemies.

Contact Tracy Tiernan About Criminal Defense Cases

A criminal defense lawyer can help you if you are facing criminal charges for Internet sex crimes, such as sharing images of your ex that your ex claims were only meant for you to see.  Contact Tracy Tiernan in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to discuss your case.