The Market of Revenge Pornography Unpunished Claims Thousands of Victims

Collecting as a business or hobby can be quite nice and fun because the purpose of a collector is to gather a collection of related items to make it complete, unique, and unparalleled. At least that’s what the definition of a collector says. But those who devised that definition never imagined that some new collectors in the age of the internet would start collecting photographs of naked individuals who did not give their consent. So-called non-consensual pornography has unfortunately become something common on the internet, and with the advancement of technology and deepfake videos, it has escalated to a higher level. Since the advent of world wide web, pornography has dominated that world, and there has been increasing talk about revenge pornography, which has surged even more during the last two years, specifically during various lockdowns.

Even before the emergence of the COVID-19 disease, non-consensual pornography was incredibly common. According to a study by the American Center for Innovative Public Health Research, one in 25 residents of the U.S. had been a victim of threats or the publication of nearly naked or naked images without their permission.

Random Porn Stars

And while victims are still facing the stigma that destroys their careers or, in worse cases, their lives, perpetrators rarely face serious consequences, even when caught. One of the better examples of impunity is the case of a 19-year-old from Kansas who admitted in August last year to threatening and distributing revenge pornography, yet still won the Democratic Party primary and became the party’s candidate for a seat in the Kansas House of Representatives. The fact that he was distributing other people’s naked photographs apparently did not concern anyone too much.

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Voluntary sharing of intimate content was also almost a universal practice before the pandemic: in a 2015 study, four out of five adults reported sending or receiving explicit texts and photographs. And that is fine if it is consensual sharing of explicit content and if one trusts the other person not to distribute that content to someone else or elsewhere. However, that is often not the case, and private exchanges end up in the depths of the internet. These new collectors of explicit content are so widespread, and the number of victims is growing day by day, that there is already talk of a trend that has been named – collector culture. The number of victims of this trend is estimated to be in the six figures, and most countries have still not stepped in to defend and protect them and declared them victims of violence and crime, and, even worse, they do not punish those who publish, sell, exchange, and share explicit photographs and videos without their knowledge.

Victims of ‘Doxxing’

The traders of this new predominantly pornographic content are most often (ex) partners of the victims, sometimes their roommates and acquaintances, neighborhood boys with good jobs, and even professors, according to media investigations of this phenomenon. As for the victims, they are indeed diverse, and they often find out that their photographs or deepfakes with their faces are being sold and shared on various platforms and forums, even Reddit, usually only after various perverts start contacting them on social media, email addresses, and even mobile numbers. And when that happens, they also become victims doxxing. This means that, in addition to photographs, their data has leaked, making the situation even more disgusting and worse for the victim. A 2014 study revealed that more than 50 percent of full names of victims as well as links to their social media profiles were published alongside their naked photographs on revenge porn sites, as well as 20 percent of email and phone addresses.

Digital Market

And there are indeed many of these platforms and sites, Reddit is just the most mainstream of them all, and there are tens, even hundreds of thousands of users of these sites. Just on Reddit, tens of thousands of men share and exchange intimate photographs and videos of women who did not give their consent, writes the BBC, which conducted an investigation into revenge pornography. This investigation revealed that thousands of photographs of naked or partially dressed women are shared and even sold on Reddit, and it all looks like a kind of marketplace. To make matters worse, Reddit and similar platforms do not do much to remove such content; moreover, platforms often, even if they manage to shut down, simply relocate their servers to other countries. An example of this is a kind of site called AnonIB, which boasts the title ‘Best Anonymous Image Board’, currently operating from Russia after being shut down several times.

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As for Reddit, they told the BBC that they have removed more than 88,000 photographs of girls who did not give their consent to their publication and added that ‘they take the problem very seriously’ and continue to remove content that violates the rules. Although they swear they are doing everything they can, the reality is simply different, and the amount of such content generated daily does not work in their favor.

Why the Questions?

According to data from the Cyber Civil Rights initiative, 90 percent of victims of non-consensual pornography are women, and research shows that victims of such pornography experience similar trauma to those who have survived sexual assault. Furthermore, not only are they more likely to be victims of such crimes, but women also face greater social and cultural retaliation than men. If their naked photographs appear on the internet or if they become public in any other way, they are more likely to be judged more harshly than men, according to research from Cyber Civil Rights.

As long as the first reaction to such events is along the lines of ‘why did she even take such a photograph?’, we will struggle to move forward as a society. The reaction should be ‘why did he do that to her?’, but such sentiments are rarely heard. What appears to be a uniquely modern form of abuse is actually violence of the most traditional kind: a woman wants control over her body, and a man takes it away from her.

Violent ‘Deepfake Porn’

And as if all that were not enough, perpetrators have recently become more creative in the ways they threaten women’s safety. In addition to revenge pornography, women are increasingly becoming victims of deepfake pornography. Deepfakes are digitally altered content in which a person’s face is placed over the body of another person, usually with the intent of damaging her reputation. And what’s worse, you don’t need to be particularly tech-savvy for all this. For instance, the website Nudify allows free ‘editing of photos with a naked effect’, and the website DeepSukebe promises ‘nudifying everything’ in a picture with a simple click of a button.

According to the AI research group DeepTrace, the number of deepfake videos on the internet increased by nearly 100 percent between 2018 and 2019 – and that was before the statistics on revenge pornography surged dramatically during the last two years and quarantine. Just in 2020, calls to the Revenge Porn Helpline in the U.S. increased by 87 percent. Deepfake pornography is predominantly directed at women, very often at famous women, and the material is often violent and even includes depictions of rape.

Amendments to the Law

In Croatia, the latest amendments to the Penal Code introduced a new criminal offense ‘Abuse of Recording of Sexually Explicit Content’, known as revenge pornography. The Ministry of Justice and Administration states that this ‘criminal offense punishes anyone who abuses a relationship of trust and without the consent of the recorded person makes available to a third party a recording of sexually explicit content that was recorded with the consent of that person for personal use and thus violates the privacy of the victim’ and that the penalty for this criminal offense is up to one year in prison. The new amendments to the law also cover deepfake pornography, and for the criminal offense of creating such content, the penalty is also up to one year, unless that content is further distributed, i.e., if it becomes available to a larger number of people, then the penalty increases to three years in prison.