Tuesday, February 03, 2015
Expensive modesty
News: Operator of revenge porn site sentenced.
Interesting as an exercise in logic. What Bollaert did is clearly a crime in a moral sense, but it's NOT extortion or blackmail in any proper or technical sense.
It's backwards, and as far as I can tell, it's a new idea that deserves a new law.
Extortion and blackmail operate on a normal person's desire to maintain his social standing. The blackmailer claims to have information that will ruin your status, and makes you pay to keep the info secret.
Revenge porn just goes ahead and makes the info public FIRST. Then you have to pay to remove the info from one site on the web. But by then it's too late, because anything interesting is instantly everywhere.
By making the payment you're admitting that you're not interesting. You're acknowledging (or betting) that this one site is probably the only place that has the damaging info.
¶ 5:05 PM 
