Emme Montgomery, better known by her online handle Negaoryx, has recently gone viral over her takedown of a troll in the comments of her Twitch stream. Those of you who proudly or shamefully lurk the web may remember her from another viral incident, one that led to her becoming known as the “Last of Us bunny girl.” During a livestream of herself playing the highly popular adventure game The Last of Us, Montgomery encounters a rabbit in-game to which she reacts, “That’s the cutest f—king thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.” After she utters the now-infamous line, the rabbit is immediately killed by an arrow and Montgomery cries out in distress. This clip was reposted countless times and eventually mutated into bastardized formats including a green-screen type overlay where it was made to look like Montgomery was reacting to different scenes. Still, it doesn’t take long for the internet hate machine to start churning. In an interview with Kotaku, Montgomery vividly describes her experience after her clip’s explosion in popularity. She recounts how she received hate mail and death threats “from people who [thought she was] being too sensitive about games she [wasn’t] even playing.” It was at this point the lawyers made an appearance:
Montgomery discussed with her lawyer the very real possibility of somebody creating a clip in which she teared up over Nazi imagery. Could she pursue legal action over that? Should she? Then there were the non-hypothetical situations, like the time somebody made her into a playable avatar in virtual reality game VRChat… “[My lawyer] was like ‘I’m gonna [sic] be honest with you: I’ve handled these cases for other people before. You can do claims to have them take it down, but full disclosure: Every [sic] single woman that I’ve assisted to do that, it backfires on them. They will send their communities after you.’ I will never forget this: He [sic] said, word for word, ‘They will make every day of your life a living hell.’
This recollection of Montgomery’s plight is an extremely illustrative example of the frontiers of property law and the unfortunate realities of law’s limitations. There are well-established bodies of work surrounding concepts such as slander, defamation, and use of imagery. However, the law is now regularly being asked to resolve disputes surrounding evanescent topics such as ownership of one’s personal identity, property rights of virtual content, and technology that is advancing so fast that a creature as lethargic as law may find it nearly impossible to keep up. What legal recourse do I have if someone creates a fake online profile of me, or if someone uses my face and body in a meme? What if they don’t use my name and no one knows it’s me except for my friends and colleagues – is that still punishable? With the push of a button, a smartphone can apply a mesh of someone else’s likeness over your own while still allowing you to speak and use facial expressions, and the result can sometimes be indistinguishable from the real thing. The same device can also allow you to spread content to millions of other people in seconds. With this kind of power and massive scale, it is inevitable that the legal problems of the future are here now, particularly concerning controlling one’s own identity and the spread of misinformation.
However, as Montgomery’s lawyer cautioned her, it isn’t that the law provides no avenues to deal with her issue – the real problem is enforcement and its aftermath. If we consider that the law is meant to provide some semblance of justice to parties who have been injured, how can it be sufficient that the mechanisms to resolve an issue exist when it is evident that these mechanisms cannot be practically applied without further injury to the same party? Though perpetually playing catchup, formal law does eventually attempt to address new and evolving issues; this is not the concern raised by Montgomery’s story. Instead, the sense is that there needs to be practicable regulation regimes instituted for online communities and emerging technology, not just a set of terms to be agreed to and ignored. This is easy to say, but incredibly difficult to implement due to the aforementioned massive scale involved and the hazy border these undertakings share with undesirable censorship. As the developing story of the Amanda Todd cyberbullying case shows, there is hope that the anonymity of the internet can’t hide abusers forever and they can in fact be held accountable for their actions online. This is but one step in a new possible direction.
For her part, Montgomery has moved on and has come to terms with the proliferation of her image into the “memeverse” and beyond. She has not let the harassers destroy her life, yet she still acknowledges how she felt powerless to stop them. These are the realities of our society. and institutions like the law must not be frightened away from continuing to come up with novel ways to combat issues relating to access to justice – especially not by some trolls on the internet.
Sources:
https://kotaku.com/for-the-streamer-from-the-last-of-us-bunny-meme-virali-1846183478