New Media don't act alone. Responsibilities behind cyberbullying, revenge porn and the case of Tiziana Cantone

Tiziana Cantone was a 31-years-old woman from Napoli, Italy, who took her life last September after years of humiliation due to the online sharing of some videos she had allowed her ex-boyfriend to record while having sex. Soon her face, linked to the sentence: “Are you recording? Bravo” that she spoke to the camera, became viral, and started to appear on the social media together with her name.

The incredible number of views and the massive sharing not only of the videos but also of an endless series of memes, pictures, songs and all sort of reinterpretations on the theme, sadly led the Italian newspapers, mostly online ones, to talk about this story in order to obtain more and more views, amplifying considerably the resonance of the event so that the woman, by then completely recognizable for people all over Italy, had to quit her job, move to another city and change her surname.

One of the articles appeared on
Italian magazines

There started her desperate battle to see all this material removed from the internet, after which she won her lawsuit for the right to be forgotten, but at the same time revived the attention on her case, and couldn’t prevent the crowd of users to repost again all the material.

The final act of this story came when, last September, she was told to pay 20.000 euros to refund Companies such as Google and YouTube, the ones against she had lose, for the legal fees. Few days later, she hanged herself with a foulard in her mother’s house.

Immediately the debate inflamed on the main newspapers, that started to blame each other while all of them silently erased all the news, often teasing and disrespectful, they had posted about her in the previous year and a half. But all of them, together with TV news, magazines, talk shows and opinion leaders, converged at finding the one to blame: the web.

How some Italian blogger ironically
described who killed Tiziana

 Leaving aside the several ways people tried to figure out the psychological reasons why this woman ended up committing suicide, it’s interesting to see how the majority of the public opinion focused the attention on the harmful power of media, starting from the smartphone that allowed to record the tape and to share it through WhatsApp, passing through social networks that made it mainstream, and finally arriving to the point to say that a stand-alone strange monster, the Web, is the social tool responsible for such an event, without referring even once to the man who shared the sex tape for the first time.

We can say, going with the flow, that two issues stand behind this situation: not only, as most of the press has highlighted, the issue of the so called ‘Revenge Porn’, but also the play of cyber-bullying. Two aspects to consider and approach from different point of views, because if in the first case we focus on the person who shared for the first time some picture for revenge, in the second case we have to pay attention to the reaction of the pack, which shouldn’t be less culpable.

As well as we should be aware that the easiness with which a content can be published, his rapidity and unlimited spreading, the fact that a computer is the perfect place where to hide, could have exacerbated the human behaviour of raging against the weak, removing those filters and limits old non-participative and broadcasted media have.

Thirty or more years ago, a story like Tiziana’s one was just impossible to listen. You still could take pictures and record videos of your private moments, and it was possible to share them without the consensus of your partner, being able to destroy her or his life. But it was something that remained inside a determined limit of space and number of people. You could show it to your friends, in some cases to the other person’s family for revenge, but for example you couldn’t go the next street cinema and ask to broadcast it, or watch it on the main television channels. You could still escape somewhere else. Some week ago, I talked with a Czech and a Hungarian: they know Tiziana Cantone, and they know the videos.

What we forget, however, is that Media are not taking control on us, they’re not recording, writing, sharing in our place. They’re just a powerful tool in the hands of people, and people can always decide how to use this tool. To say that the web killed Tiziana Cantone is like to say that millions of deaths in the second world war were caused by the power of new weapons, switching the point from the player to the medium, leaving aside the intentions. Behind each tool there’s a person who use it, and whether powerful this could be, the action depends on the will: something that Facebook, and other social networks don’t have.