A New York City council voted Thursday to criminalize revenge porn, making it a crime in the city to disseminate "intimate" photos or videos of someone else without their consent. Doing so in the city will now be punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to one year of jail time. According to the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit that fights online abuse and non-consensual porn, this means NYC joins 38 other states and Washington D.C. in criminalizing revenge porn.

The legislation protects the non-consensual sharing of private photos or videos online and also through text or email. The only exception, according to initial coverage by Gothamist, is if the images are "somehow a matter of public interest." And to be clear, the newly passed bill only applies to offenders in NYC — not all of New York state.

Aside from legislation like what was passed in NYC, private citizens (often victims of revenge porn themselves) and companies like Pornhub have been fighting against revenge porn for years. And as Gizmodo notes, most major social media platforms — most recently, Facebook — have policies against posting revenge porn. But legislation at the city or state level is still an important step in the fight against revenge porn. States like California, where there's a statewide criminalization of revenge porn, have already seen arrests of people on charges of sharing non-consensual pornography.

While federal bans on revenge porn have been introduced, the idea of passing one is still controversial. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, a nationwide ban could lead to a violation of First Amendment rights, or a criminalization of other actions the ban isn't meant to apply to (like sending a friend an unsolicited dick pic you got from a stranger on Tinder). But as more and more states and cities pass laws making it a crime to share a private, intimate photo or video of someone without their consent, it will hopefully become clear that revenge porn is never ok.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Headshot of Hannah Smothers
Hannah Smothers

Hannah writes about health, sex, and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and you can follow her on Twitter and Instagram. Her work can also be found in the Cut, Jezebel, and Texas Monthly.