Revenge porn as a form of gender-based violence discourse: A case study

For a number of years, the Internet and its numerous social media platforms have evolved into the primary arena for communication disorders (such as fake news) and actual person-to-person attacks (emblematic of what happens with hate speech). The occurrences that have primarily featured women as protagonists are sadly well-known. Cases of chronicle have highlighted the need and urgency of finding legal tools that could be used to try to prevent and counter all those specific behaviours (such as, for example: flaming, harassment, put down, trickery, exposure, happy slapping, but also cyberbullying or the cyberstalking). Tiziana Cantone’s case (Italy) is one of these. She was the victim of some men in a revenge porn case and allegedly committed suicide in 2016 because of the blame put on her and her legal inability to have her right to cancellation (or to be forgotten) recognized. The case was brought to the Italian Parliament and after some parliamentary questions about it, in 2019, the Parliament modified the Criminal Procedure Code, introducing in its amendments the new crime of illicit dissemination of sexually explicit images or videos – the so-called Red Code. In this essay, we will discursively analyse the online comments made by ter users on the case of Tiziana Cantone on social media, on a corpus-based approach. Texts found on the Net and selected with the following keywords: #tizianacantone, #revengeporn #genderbasedviolence, formed a corpus of 480,129 tokens (397,853 types). The corpus thus collected has been investigated with Sketch Engine with the purpose to demonstrate the nuanced ways in which acts and discourses account for societal practices. This situates our analysis as a modern type of online gender-based violence and abusive discourse.