Keywords

The Events

Most of the information in this section derives from the Italian newspaper Il Post, 2016.

I have chosen Tiziana Cantone’s case for various reasons. First, it shows the complex interrelationships between technological, relational, cultural and normative frameworks. Second, it enables understanding the role of traces in the transmissibility and transformability of shame in diverse face-to-face and digital contexts. Third, it demonstrates how political and economic actors negotiate the institution of a digital moral order. Fourth, the case played a major role in the redefinition of the normative regulation of pornography and hate cybercrimes.

Let me briefly summarise the main events. Between November 2014 and April 2015, Tiziana Cantone, a 30-year-old woman living in a village near the metropolitan city of Naples, yielded to her partner’s request to be filmed while having sex with other men. In total, the couple recorded six videos that, in April 2015, were shared with acquaintances, who apparently disseminated them without their consent to other WhatsApp users. In the shared videos, all the participants’ faces were pixeled (obscured) except for Tiziana Cantone’s. Within hours, the videos went viral on WhatsApp and were downloaded by several thousand people on their devices. The videos spread mainly in the densely inhabited geographical area where the couple lived, fuelling gossip against Cantone. On April, 2015, the compromising videos were first posted on major pornographic portals, still without any consent from Tiziana Cantone. A little later, some users extracted a scene that would go viral from one of the six videos. The short video excerpt shows Tiziana Cantone having sexual intercourse with another man and exclaiming as she turns to her partner, “Mi stai facendo il video? Bravo!” [Are you making a video? Bravo!].

This scene would be used in parodic videos and memes that spread very quickly on the main social networks to the point of making Tiziana Cantone a negative icon of collective mockery and shaming. Thousands of social media users participated in this process, including Italian celebrities. In the following days, Cantone’s memes were reproduced on t-shirts, mugs and other merchandising items (BBC, 2017), her negative icon utterly commodified. A parody of the unhappily famous scene was also included in the music video of an Italian pop star posted on YouTube in June 2015 and still available on the platform.Footnote 1 As I write this article, the music video has collected 28.3 million views.

Tiziana Cantone, the victim of this enormity, took the case to court in May 2015, suing those responsible for the non-consensual dissemination of intimate images and asking the porn websites, social networks and web providers to remove the six original videos and all the derived content. Given the glacial pace of the Italian judicial system, the court reached a verdict only a year later. In the meantime, Cantone requested and was granted a changed surname. She moved away from her usual place of residence and did everything possible to conceal her identity in the offline world.

In the summer of 2016, an Italian court required companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google and YouTube to remove any post or content directly or indirectly related to Tiziana Cantone. The judge found the platforms guilty of not having timely accepted the woman’s request to remove the offending content and their indexing of it. The court recognised Cantone’s right to compensation but postponed its determination to a future trial. Meanwhile, Cantone was forced to pay each of the five companies €3655 (for a total of €18,225 + VAT = approximately €22,000) due to formal errors committed by her lawyers. Another relevant aspect of the story with respect to the topics of this article is that Cantone was denied the right to be forgotten because, according to a statement in the verdict, “[The] fundamental prerequisite for the interested party to oppose the processing of personal data, citing the right to be forgotten, is that such data relate to events dating back over time” while, in Cantone’s case, “the court did not consider the time elapsed long enough to make the collective interest disappear” (Il Post, 2016).

A few days after the reading of the judgement, in September 2016, Tiziana Cantone committed suicide. Judicial investigations of the causes and dynamics of her death are still ongoing. The case has produced a great international impact. Global broadcasters, such as CNN, BBC and the New York Times (CNN, 2016; BBC, 2017; New York Times, 2016) have covered it. The international debate on this and homologous cases has given rise to calls for legal changes regarding the diffusion of leaked private videos and for greater protection for the victims of such cybercrimes (Pavan & Lavorgna, 2021).

A Theory of Digital Shameful Traces

The production and diffusion of a digital shameful trace are a complex social process, and understanding it requires focusing on the elements of a concerted social action. I propose here to divide the phenomenon into five constitutive elements; first, the ontology of the symbolic element that becomes the trace and conveys shame; second, the actors involved in its production and diffusion; third, the temporal and spatial coordinates of the diffusion and the technical or social means employed in it; and finally (fourth and fifth), the cultural and normative frameworks constituting the background of the shaming process and enabling the diffusion of shame.

Regarding the ontology of a shameful trace, we must start by deconstructing some commonly understood categories, such as revenge porn, that are often used in media studies to address cases like the one here analysed. That category, as Tiziana Cantone’s case shows, is reductive. First, the concept of revenge focusses attention on the responsibility of only one offender—the partner who initially disseminates intimate images—while, as we will show, the number of human and non-human actors and audiences involved in the process of shaming is very large, and their conduct and responsibility are highly differentiated but interconnected. Digital shaming cannot be understood as other than a massive sociotechnical process.

Second, the concept of revenge attributes to the male partner a specific and reductive intention: creating awareness of the purported offence of his (ex- or current) partner for relational reasons. However, this is not always the case. In most cases of cyberviolence against women, it is not simply or not only a conscious desire for revenge that motivates men who disseminate intimate images without the consent of their partners. Rather, the situations in which the images are produced and then disseminated, the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator and the states of awareness (Glaser & Strauss, 1968) that characterise all the actors involved in the process are plural and contradictory. Third, focussing on revenge implicitly blames the victim for her relational conduct. Fourth, what becomes a source of shame is not only and not simply pornographic content. It is, rather, an intimate slice of privacy that becomes a source of shame only in given situations and in given cultural and normative frameworks with the participation of given social actors united by a given social bond. Finally, as Tiziana Cantone’s case shows, the source of shame may shift from the original content disseminated by a partner to further user-generated by-products.

More neutral categorisations, such as image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) (Henry et al., 2020) and non-consensual dissemination of intimate images (NCDII) (Maddocks, 2018) may be more useful in reaching a sociological understanding of the digital forms of violence against women enacted through the use of shameful traces. Still, they do not help us understand how shame is culturally and interactionally produced and transmitted, understand the role of social bonds or understand how digital traces transform the overall process of shaming. Let us start with the first dimension.

Shame is a family of social emotions of diverse intensity and expression. Thomas Scheff defines it as “the large family of emotions that includes many cognates and variants, most notably embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, and related feelings such as shyness that originate in threats to the social bond. This definition integrates self (emotional reactions) and society (the social bond)” (Scheff, 2003: 255). Shame, then, depends on social bonds, on role expectations in a social organisation (Goffman, 1956) and, finally, on the contexts of interaction, i.e. situations. The process of shaming typically follows a moral transgression of publicly accepted rules of behaviour/appearance/conduct from the societal side and a sense of inadequacy from the subjective side. As Thomas Scheff brilliantly suggests, shame is our moral gyroscope (Scheff, 2003: 254). Any of our behaviours is preceded and influenced by “a sense of shame” (Scheff, 2000: 96).

Therefore, no trace of a morally reprehensible behaviour/appearance/conduct is in itself a shameful trace. It is so only in latent form (Sabetta, 2018). For a record—such as a memory, text, audiovisual record or any other element—to become an object of shame, it is necessary that it crosses the moral boundaries of specific situations, social bonds and regulatory standards. Actually, a shameful trace is a vector. It transports shame from a spatial context to another, from a temporal context to another. The overall process of shaming is the mediation between something that happened in a context where it was legitimate and its moral condemnation in a different spatial, temporal and social context. Given this consideration, in a digitalised society, intimate shameful traces are more and more important in the spreading of shame.

Indeed, the collective violence perpetrated against Tiziana Cantone depended on the circulation of non-consensual intimate images outside the intimate sphere of the couple. It is necessary to emphasise that it was not the sexual behaviour itself that was stigmatised so much as the fact that a trace of it was spread outside the moral boundaries of her intimacy without the consent of the victim. The shameful trace is an evidence marker (Brekhus, 1998) of the unequivocal existence of a behaviour that goes against the moral standards of the community. In modern Western societies, self-discipline (Elias, 1994), control over of one’s corporeality (Goffman, 1961) and rules of conduct represent essential symbolic means of preserving face (Goffman, 1955). Any dissemination of intimate images, i.e. traces of sexual activity, outside the private sphere is therefore a clear threat to one’s reputation. This is particularly true in an ambivalent technological context in which people are asked to preserve their privacy but also pushed to renounce to it to interact on social media and other platforms that threaten their privacy.

Cuckoldry, Masculine Domination and Shame

Shame based on NCDII is a critical social problem for women, whose sexual freedom is still contested and who are the predominant victims of this kind of cybercrime (Pavan & Lavorgna, 2021). Let us return to Tiziana Cantone’s case and to the sexual act she performed together with her partner and others external to the couple to understand how such practices make women’s reputations particularly vulnerable.

Cuckoldry is a very old sexual script (Simon & Gagnon, 2003) that has been represented in narrative fiction since the times of Boccaccio and Shakespeare (Alfar, 2017). In the public imagination, it is a typically heterosexual phenomenon. As considered using the concepts introduced by Goffman in Frame Analysis (1974), consensual cuckoldry represents a regrounding of traditional patriarchal dynamics.Footnote 2 During the sexual act, the traditional power inequality between men and women is inverted. The woman enacts a dominant role by flirting or having sex with other men, while the man assumes the role of the humiliated (ashamed, for our theoretical interests). As soon as the performance of cuckoldry ends, however, the masculine domination and the risk of shaming (Bourdieu, 2001) are both against the female partner. The male partner controls the scene, its reproduction and its public dissemination, while the other men participating in the performanceFootnote 3 control information about their sexuality that could be harmful to both, but that is particularly harmful to women as explained before. Also, cuckoldry challenges the traditional relationship between romantic love and sexual scripts; it is constitutively based on a challenge to traditional norms of shame avoidance.

What has recently changed is the relevance of audiovisual traces produced during this kind of performance. In the past decade (Lokke, 2019), cuckoldry pornography has become very popular on the internet thanks to the proliferation of pornographic portals and forums hosting amateur material and because of the weak normative regulation of this world. While, in classic cuckoldry, the masculine domination (Bourdieu, 2001) was enacted simply by control over the scene, now, as in the case of Tiziana Cantone, it is based on control of the visual traces produced during the cuckoldry and on the ritual degradation of women’s reputations enacted by sharing their intimacy with other men and by forcing women to endure any form of public offence to their dignity. In cuckold forums, such as the ones now spreading on Telegram (Semenzin & Bainotti, 2020), NCDII represents a kind of currency in a market of moral degradation (Ziccardi, 2020). The female body is commodified and offered to the male gaze as a dematerialised currency exchanged within a wider market of erotic extortion (Kempton, 2020). The participants exchange intimate images of their partners in market-like transactions that fuel both their sexual pleasure and the moral degradation of their partners.

To conclude, the sexual behaviour of the couple becomes an object of possible shame and moral degradation as soon as it is exposed to an audience larger than the couple themselves.Footnote 4 Subsequently, audiovisual traces are key elements, and the digital turn of society has made this point more evident than ever before.

Shame, Social Bonds and Communication

Thus, a consideration of the relationship between shame and situation is merited. Applying Thomas Scheff’s theory, I first consider the relationship between shame and social bonds. In Section “The Sociotechnical and Normative Frameworks”, I focus on the socio-technological and normative frameworks.

The key moments in the dissemination of shameful traces against Tiziana Cantone were as follows:

  • First, her partner shared their private videos with a group of acquaintances.

  • Second, some of the recipients shared the videos with other WhatsApp contacts who mainly lived in the metropolitan and peri-urban area of Naples.

  • Third, someone posted the videos to pornographic portals, sharing them with a potentially vast audience of web users.

  • Fourth, by-products of the original videos (shorter clips, memes, parodic videos) were produced and shared on social media among a national audience.

In the first context, the recipients of the videos personally knew the couple and had already interacted with them before the delivery. Therefore, the mediated digital interaction (Thompson, 2020) took place from a sender to a small number of known recipients. The video recordings had a predominantly erotic value. The few male recipients, in fact, represented the audience chosen by Tiziana Cantone’s partner to realise his erotic fantasy in front of an audience.

In the second context of shame, Cantone and her partner’s acquaintances shared the videos with a larger audience comprising their WhatsApp contacts. These, in turn, transmitted the videos to other contacts, giving rise to a massive, snowballing process of dissemination. Between this stage and the following, over 200,000 users would download Tiziana Cantone’s videos on their devices.Footnote 5 From a communicative point of view, this is perhaps the most interesting stage. In fact, what happened was neither an interpersonal communication of one to a few defined recipients as in the first stage nor a communication of one to many indefinite recipients as in the typical case of mass media broadcasts (Thompson, 2020). Rather, we are faced with many networked publics (Russel, 2008) that internally shared the videos. Recalling Coleman’s boat metaphor (Coleman, 1994), what appears a posteriori as a macro-sociological phenomenon was the sum of many actions in many smaller social circles that shared interpersonal social bonds.

In this second sociotechnical context, the social function of the visual traces changed. They were now vectors of shame and mainly used as a source of gossip, a form of social control that joins the private and public spheres (Scotson & Elias, 1965), and that tends to be violent in its social effects. Significant in this regard is the fact that the videos first spread in the same densely inhabited geographical area where the couple lived. Furthermore, Tiziana Cantone’s identity was made easily recognisable. To describe homologous processes, feminist scholars have spoken of slut-shaming. As Gong and Hoffman put it, “Women who do engage in sexual activity or are simply perceived to be interested in such activity are [condemned and considered as] bad or dirty” (Gong & Hoffman, 2012: 580).

The third phase is the one where the communication is similar to the forms of mass media broadcasting: from one to many indefinite recipients (Thompson, 2020). Still, even on the most famous pornographic website, the identity of the victim was made recognisable, and this aspect connected the indefinite audience of web users with the local community where Tiziana Cantone lived and where shame kept circulating. Thus, interpersonal social bonds were less evident but still present even at this stage.

Finally, the original shameful traces were transformed in user-generated by-products: shorter non-pornographic captures, memes and parodic videos widely shared on social media. At a national level, the defamation and shaming that befell Tiziana Cantone relied heavily on such secondary, non-pornographic products derived from the original videos. It all began with the publication of a meme that went viral in a very short time. The visual is a capture from one of the six original videos. The text mentions the sadly famous sentence pronounced by Tiziana Cantone to her partner: “You are making a video? Bravo!” She appears confident in performing the sexual activities and in their videotaping. In the eyes of common feeling, she thus demonstrates inappropriateness and naivety, because she is unable to predict the consequences that she would encounter. Soon, the sentence became a catchphrase, a national running joke all over Italy, and Cantone became a negative icon to be publicly mocked. Thousands of web users shared homologous memes and parodies without this being perceived as a morally despicable practice. At the base of these diffusion processes are specific characteristics of this communicative genre, to which it is therefore necessary to turn our attention.

According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, meme has two meanings, the first being “an idea that is passed from one member of society to another, not in the genes but often by people copying it”. This meaning derives from the work of Richard Dawkins, who introduced the term in The Selfish Gene in 1976. Etymologically, the term derives from the Greek mímēma (imitation). Only in the past decade, first within internet studies and then in the common understanding, has a second meaning emerged that is more appropriate to the case we are investigating: “an image, a video, a piece of text, etc. that is passed very quickly from one internet user to another, often with slight changes that make it humorous” (Oxford Learner’s Dictionary).

The definition contains three elements, all pertinent to the Cantone case: social contagion (or imitation), appropriation and humour. That is, virality is not enough for content to become a meme (Börzsei, 2013). It is also necessary for a user to actively transform it into something personal, to appropriate it with humour and bring it closer to her/his own experience (as do others). Memes are indeed hybrid cultural products. They use digital pop culture images to express feelings, moods, stances and relationships. This interpenetration of semantic levels makes them particularly suitable for communicative contexts, such as those of social media, in which the genres of public discussion and interpersonal narration come together.

In conclusion, in all phases of this diffusion of shameful traces, one can observe a connection between various forms of social and emotive bonds: the couple’s private sphere, the interpersonal sphere of a given social circle and the wider audience composed of first a local community and then a national community of web users. In each of these contexts, the predominant meaning and function of the trace changed. In successive iterations, it represented erotic content, a virtual currency of moral degradation, a topic of gossip and, finally, humorous content to be shared with social media friends and followers. This shows that shameful traces are plastic signifiers that adapt to the contexts of diffusion and to the actors who appropriate them.

Two crucial elements that we have not yet discussed are the sociotechnical contexts and the regulatory frameworks that constitute the background of the spread of traces. I do this in the next section.

The Sociotechnical and Normative Frameworks

The shaming that affected Tiziana Cantone in 2015 would have had different—probably less cruel—effects in the current sociotechnical and normative context.Footnote 6 Since the events, instant messaging platforms, social media networks and pornographic portals have adopted more restrictive policies against NCDII. In 2018, the European General Data Protection Regulation took effect, offering stronger protection of web users’ privacy and security. Various countries, such as Australia (2018), Italy (2019) and the UK (2021) as well as 42 states in the USA have introduced new laws to combat IBSA and other forms of cybercrime, but, frankly, the overall regulation of hate speech, IBSA and homologous cybercrimes is not as linear as it may seem.

First, legislatures must achieve the right balance between censorship and freedom of expression. Second, the bargaining power of the big web players is so great that it is most often states that must negotiate the conditions of action within them. Third, a substantial number of xenophobic and/or populist politicians exploit existing normative vacuums to construct a consensus based on symbolic violence. Fourth, the intersection of online and offline worlds often makes it difficult to establish the real jurisdiction of some cybercrimes. Finally, each new legislation collides with the very rapid obsolescence of hardware and software technologies. The more technological change accelerates, the quicker the normative regulation of it becomes obsolete.

Tiziana Cantone’s case involved three main sociotechnical frameworks of trace diffusion: WhatsApp, pornographic portals and Facebook. In none of them did censorship stop the circulation of shameful traces (pornographic videos and derived content).

Beginning with WhatsApp, it must be considered that its nature as an instant messaging platform without any official access to users’ messages makes the moderation of shared content impossible. When Cantone’s videos were disseminated on WhatsApp, the existing procedure made it very quick and easy for users to share content in a few clicks with as many as 256 contacts at a time. This technical capability strongly affected the speed of the diffusion of the shameful traces. Only in 2019, in the face of political and civil pressure to reduce the viral spread of fake news and hate content, was this capacity for mass forwarding removed from the app. Today, it remains possible to share defamatory content with thousands of contacts, but the operation has become far slower and more laborious, as the maximum number of shares each time varies from 1 to 5.Footnote 7

Pornographic websites constituted the second context of defamation and shame. Again, together with the introduction of new laws protecting people’s privacy and security, the civil sphere has played a massive role in limiting the circulation of non-consensual intimate images. In December 2020, a New York Times inquiry by Nicholas Kristof denounced the dissemination of content showing sexual abuse or portraying minors or NCDII on one of the major players in this field, Pornhub (New York Times, 2020) and a broad public controversy arose in the USA and around the world. Pornhub immediately banned the uploading of videos to unverified accounts—basically, ones other than those of production companies and actors—and removed the feature that allowed videos to be downloaded. This change in the biggest porn player’s policies also affected competing websites, although significant differences still exist between national regulations as well as between the indexed web and the dark web.

The last and most complex context is that of social media. Here, shameful traces were of different kinds: video excerpts from the original videos, links to external pornographic and non-pornographic websites, memes and parodic videos. While it is easier to identify and ban explicit pornographic content on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, only the intervention of the judge in Cantone’s case made it possible to remove all the defamatory content of a non-pornographic nature.

Another socio-normative controversy concerns the juridical nature of social media and whether they are more similar to organs of information or to simple containers of user-generated content. From one case to another, the responsibilities and functions of social networks change considerably. In 2016, the Italian Supreme Court, in a judgement concerning a case of insults and defamation (manifested in the form of offensive material published on the platform), clarified that Facebook is not included in the concept of the free press, falling at most in the related category of “any other means of publicity”.Footnote 8

Looking again at Facebook, recent research has revealed a poor process of moderation of abusive comments and posts. Matthew Hindman, Nathaniel Lubin and Trevor Davis analysed the 500 US-based pages with the highest average engagement in the summer of 2020, and the preliminary results were published in February 2002 in The Atlantic. As they summarise in the article, “Of the 219 accounts with at least 25 public comments, 68 percent spread misinformation, reposted in spammy ways, published comments that were racist or sexist or anti-Semitic or anti-gay, wished violence on their perceived enemies, or, in most cases, several of the above” (Hindman et al., 2022).

In conclusion, regarding the socio-technological and normative frameworks pertinent to the case, we may observe some points of sociological interest. First, the digital normative order is the product of competing yet linked ecologies (Abbott, 2005), such as government, supranational entities, digital media companies and actors in civil society. Second, the overlap between competing jurisdictions often makes regulatory frameworks opaque and contradictory. In this condition, shameful traces tend to circulate more rapidly, and those who share them or download them on their devices act within hybrid communication frameworks in which the private and public spheres often overlap. Consequently, morally despicable behaviours are not perceived as such. In other words, an “everybody does it” immunity is claimed, and, in highly imitative processes, profiling and indexing algorithms certainly play an important role. The shame projected on the victim subjectively mitigates the shame associated with the denigratory action of the web users.

Discussion

Shameful traces are the constitutive elements of IBSAs and other, similar forms of cybercrime involving the denigration or stigmatisation of the victim. They move from a communicative and normative ecology to another when specific interactional, sociotechnical and normative conditions occur as demonstrated in the previous two sections. Their high shareability extends the magnitude of the shame over time and space and makes them essentially undeletable, as the reference to the denial of the right to be forgotten in Tiziana Cantone’s story shows. Furthermore, they connect the intimate, interpersonal and collective dimensions. Shame is thus expressed in a semi-private and semi-public digital context in which the moral degradation of victims is unconnected to any moral imperative.

To understand this last point, it seems useful in conclusion to propose a comparison between IBSAs and what Harold Garfinkel has defined as successful degradation ceremonies. In Garfinkel’s approach, a degradation ceremony could be conceived as “Any communicative work between persons, whereby the public identity of an actor is transformed into something looked on as lower in the local scheme of social types” (Garfinkel, 1956: 420). The perpetrator is a representative of a public authority and an emanation of the social structure. The site and time of the ceremony is separated from everyday life. It is performed because of moral indignation and the danger that the precipitating events pose to social solidarity.

In IBSAs, by contrast, audiences share a common focus of attention (the shameful trace) but in separate and overlapping places and times. The reason for the violence directed at the victim has nothing to do with moral indignation or the reconstruction of some form of social solidarity. No public authority conducts the ceremony. Rather, multiple users stage their own personal or interpersonal degradation ceremonies in their semi-private and semi-public digital spaces.

We are therefore in a rather different situation from the typically Durkheimian one that inspired Harold Garfinkel in the elaboration of his famous theory. Indeed, shameful traces are shared and instrumentally used in various situations of contrasting nature. Compared to the symbolic interactionist perspective and to the ethnometodological perspective, the case I analysed defies the same assumption of a situation as a normative, clearly perceived and operationally defined frame of action.