Microsoft makes it way easier to report revenge porn

Revenge porn is disgusting, destructive and getting to be tragically common, so much so that titans of the web have been cooking up ways to deal with it. Microsoft is the latest to join the fray, as it just joined Google in giving victims a way to shut down illicit stuff they don't want seen. Starting today, people can fill out a form on Microsoft's support site to flag the content in question, confirm that they didn't want whatever it was to be distributed in the first place and provide legal documentation if they've got it.

If the request is valid, Microsoft will then strike the offending matter from the web-crawling record that is Bing, as well as "remove access to the content itself when shared on OneDrive or Xbox Live." As valuable as the tool might seem (we'll see how quickly Microsoft resolves these cases) it's still just part one part of the process a revenge porn victim has to deal with. If that not-so-private content got indexed by Google, for instance, that's yet another search party to contact and deal with. And these steps are what need to happen just to ensure such results don't infect a person's search engine presence; none of it even begins to deal with the other creepy randos serving up the offending photos and videos themselves. Revenge porn will live on as long as shitty people do -- and that won't change any time soon -- but at least it's getting a just a little easier to mitigate.