In the ’90s, Silicon Valley promised that in the Internet era, citizens of the world would all be free. Yet this technological utopia seems to have taken quite a turn for more of a dystopia. In 2014 and far from being free, a few global corporations with considerable power, and very little ethics rule the Internet.

Over the weekend of Sept. 1, hundreds of nude pictures of celebrities were stolen through an iCloud breach. That alone should upset anyone, but on the Internet, some people disagreed. On the social network Reddit, many men expressed not only their contentment with the leak, but also their contempt for the victims. These users had no quarrel with the hacker who had stolen the photos, but did laugh at these women for taking pictures of themselves. This is not acceptable. We as a public do not have any say in the private life of any one individual. The only one to blame is the hacker who shamelessly exposed these celebrities to the world.

With such a reaction, it is no surprise that Reddit soon became the primary platform to distribute the pictures. The very structure of the site easily facilitated the sharing of the questionable content. It’s a decentralized community composed of thousands of ‘subreddits’ dedicated to topics as various as travels, politics, Harry Potter and cat pictures. Each subreddit has its own rules, culture and moderators, and the company’s policy is to remain as little involved as possible with content moderation, which is why sharing the stolen nudes widely didn’t require anything more than the creation of a new subreddit for the matter.

When the company decided to take it down, it took the community by surprise. Accusations of censorship arose and angry users expressed shock that the administrators betrayed the very principles Reddit stood for. To some extent, they were not mistaken as the company has shown very little concern for actual individual freedom. Yishan Wong, the CEO of Reddit, defended the decision in a blog post entitled “Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul”, but without ever referring to the right to privacy. Rather, he cited the “DMCA requests from the lawful owners” of the pictures. He proceeded to confirm that they were “unlikely to make changes to [their] existing site content policies” because it is their firm belief that “you – the user – has the right to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, and that it is your responsibility to do so.”

It is striking that Wong reasoned not in terms of ethics, but of copyright law. In its current form, the laws are more protective of major rights holders than of individuals. Few victims of privacy violations have the means to file a lawsuit, which leaves Reddit unchallenged. The site is a major platform with a global reach, but few can influence its policies. Refusing to acknowledge the need of ethics to make good use of this power is nothing short of a self-conscious choice and a cruel strategy.

In fact, the website already has a long history of ongoing issues. To this day, it’s still a major source of harassment against women who speak out against sexism. Some subreddits such as /r/TumblrInAction have been pointed out for the anonymous insults and threats they directed against feminist bloggers of Tumblr.

These people are the victims of a massive power imbalance. Behind the excuse of free speech, they were stripped of their individual rights to privacy and respect. We are subjected to the will of a new kind of Internet overlords, and we have very few ways to shape their policies.

Associate professor Paul Booth believed change was possible. He noted that the community-driven Web is still in its infancy, and that a self-regulated platform might emerge in the long term. However, we’ll need to structure social media differently to achieve this goal. Booth noted that Reddit was primarily driven by outrage, because “the things that get uprooted are the ones which strike people the most.” On the contrary, Tumblr represented a “safe space”. Its user-base is composed of many women who thrive without fear of harassment in a very supportive community. Some simple, yet thoughtful design decisions are at the root of a respectful environment: “Tumblr doesn’t have a system of, this is the best, this is the worst. It just has reblogs. You just see what other people think. That might be more interesting as a community-building device.”

There is no doubt that we can build online communities where all people feel welcome, but we must voice our concern to the overlords of the Internet. We need to reject their free speech fallacy and value the simple, but ethical decisions, which make online spaces safe.