This post is the first in a series that will explore ethical issues in digital media research.

This week’s RDM guest blogger, Brooke Nelson, is a second year student at USF’s Master’s program in Applied Linguistics.  In addition to her studies focusing on Teaching English as a Second/Foreign language, Brooke has developed an interest in multimodal digital discourse analysis.  She recently presented her research at the SECOL and A-MODE conferences.

Brooke writes:

I’ve been working on this project about women’s responses to online sexual harassment since Fall 2018. Instagram accounts such as “ByeFelipe” have emerged as spaces where women can share and document instances of harassment and – in some cases – their own responses to such acts of online aggression. Women who have been targets of online harassment on Instagram as well as on popular online dating platforms (e.g., Tinder, Bumble) can post screenshots of abusive messages they have received to the “ByeFelipe” account and, by doing so, share their experiences with others.

I got it interested in this phenomenon because of my own experiences on dating apps and social media. I always knew how I responded to online harassment- with the utmost sass. My favorite was to give them the fictitious number- 1-800-NAH-PASS. I was also partial to sending their Tinder profiles to their girlfriends or wives. However, I had no idea about the creativity that other women employed.  Some of the interesting things I’ve found include the unexpected ways that women exploit different platform affordances as well as the types of intertextual references they draw on when they “clap back” to those who have harassed them.

The first example shows an instance of how one woman creatively incorporates a familiar  intertextual reference when responding to an unwelcome sexual message from a man.  In it, she responds with a slightly modified monologue from the classic film, The Godfather. This iconic movie scene is recontextualized by the female user for the purposes of objecting to the message sent by the male user, while at the same time humorously informing him that such a message is not only inappropriate but also disrespectful.

Next, in the following example, a woman shows how she exploited the platform affordances of Instagram to respond to a male user who sent her a sexually explicit photo.  After receiving the unwelcome photo from this man, the female recipient took a screenshot of a list of his Instagram followers, and threatened to forward his original message and photo to all of his female followers on the social media platform.

Along with this verbal threat, she also included a photo of the doll used in the Saw franchise, which the antagonist in the films uses to deliver horrifying ultimatums.  So in her response, this female user not only exploits the affordances of Instagram (forwarding the harassing message to the sender’s followers), but she also includes a multimodal resource (image of the doll from Saw), which happens to also be an intertextual reference to a popular film series.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about some of the complicated ethical issues that my research raises. My main question revolves around the second example. Is the (re-)posting of this image a type of “revenge porn”?

Revenge porn is typically considered the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their permission. For instance, websites like IsAnyoneUp,dedicated to sharing user-generated content, often featured revenge porn – unauthorized images of users’ former partners along with identifying information about them. As a response, several years ago local governments began to take action against revenge porn and its distribution. But getting back to my own research, Example 2 includes a screenshot that was posted to a public Instagram account, and it was likely posted without the subject’s permission. This begs the question: Is this a new form of revenge porn?

This question seems to evade an easy yes/no answer.  Yes, the example I provided is certainly sexually explicit, and yes, it was likely posted (on ByeFelipe, by the recipient of the image) without the permission of the individual depicted in the photo. However, the individual’s name is blocked out, his face is hidden, and his genitals are covered. Furthermore, the page’s creator edited the images, thus left no identifying information about him included in this post: no address, no social media handles, no location. (It is also worth pointing out that the person who was sent this photo likely did not give her permission to receive this type of image in the first place!) I would argue that the reposting of the image by the female social media user who received the uninvited image (along with her response to it) onto Bye Felipe is intended to draw public attention to the inappropriateness of this more widespread type of behavior (sending unsolicited sexually explicit photos) – and perhaps to also empower other women who are also the targets of online sexual harassment – rather than to publicly shame the individual person responsible for sending this one specific image.   While this question is too large to be thoroughly addressed in one blog post, it appears that with the rise of social mediapages like ByeFelipe, the debate over revenge porn is about to become even more complex.