The suicide of an Italian woman who fought a long court battle to get videos of her having sex removed from the internet has rekindled a national debate on the perils of social media.
The woman, Tiziana Cantone, was found dead Tuesday in her family’s home near Naples, where she had apparently hanged herself.
Ms Cantone knew she was being recorded in April 2015 when the six sex videos were made, a time of “fragility and depression” for her, according to Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
But the videos soon went viral, apparently because they were widely shared and posted by the “virtual friends” to whom she had sent them, the newspaper said.
Police in Naples have opened a criminal investigation.
Not long after the videos were posted online, Ms Cantone was being recognised on the street. T-shirts began to appear emblazoned with something she was heard to say in one of the clips: “Are you shooting a video? Bravo!”
Distraught at her unwanted notoriety, she left her job, moved to another part of Italy and filed a lawsuit demanding that the videos be taken down. Italian news outlets reported on her efforts to disappear from public view, physically and virtually.
A judge in Naples ruled in her favour this month, ordering websites to remove the videos and never repost them. But the judge also ruled that Ms Cantone had to pay the legal costs of some of the companies she sued because of errors in her court filings.
Elisabetta Garzo, president of the Naples court where the case was heard, told the daily La Repubblica on Friday that there were so many websites involved in the litigation that it took months to hear from them all. She added that once that was done, “the procedure was very fast.”
Ms Garzo’s decision was published on September 5th, about a year after Ms Cantone filed her lawsuit. That was a relatively quick result by Italian standards, legal experts said, but still an eternity on the internet, where the enforcement authorities are inevitably a step behind.
The Italian data protection authority has the power to act much faster than the courts - it can order images removed within days, and sometimes hours. But an official at the authority said it never received a complaint from Ms Cantone.
“I don’t think Italy is lacking norms to protect its citizens,” said Guido Scorza, a law professor at the University of Bologna.
“Unfortunately, in such cases, it’s like emptying the ocean with a bucket. Even if the watchdog ordered the cancellation of 300 URLs, another 300 could appear the day after.”
Many Italians were indignant over reports that video-sharing websites had not only posted the videos, but had profited from them. Antonello Soro, the president of the data protection authority, said in an interview with SkyTg24 news channel that those earnings were “indecent.”
Soon after Ms Cantone’s death, Italian newspapers reported the apparent rape of a teenager in a nightclub toilet stall that was videotaped by her friends and circulated on WhatsApp.
Michela Marzano, an Italian writer and philosopher, wrote in La Repubblica this week that people seemed too willing to circulate intrusive, even shocking, material on the internet. She said the trend is “as if offenses and insults didn’t have important consequences in a person’s life.”
“We are lacking responsible education in using social networks,” Ms Marzano wrote. “We are lacking the capacity to understand that a life can be destroyed when someone’s reputation is damaged.”
New York Times