Revenge porn is not a new concept.
People have broken up and threatened to sell the sex tape created during the relationship for years. Former Spice Girl Mel B is going through that right now. She has just won a court order against her estranged husband, banning him from distributing the tape.
However, the creation of the Internet has made everything so much worse. These images and videos can go viral within a matter of hours. For those of you unsure, revenge porn, according to Urban Dictionary, is the, “a nude photograph or video which is publicly shared online (most frequently by an ex-lover of the subject’s) for the purpose of spiteful humiliation and/or the lulz.”
What kind of asshole would do that, right?
Well, apparently so many that some states have either already criminalised or are moving to criminalise the release of sexual images online without consent.
What are the big social media companies doing about it, though?
Well, Facebook and Twitter have already announced that the sharing of these images is against their community guidelines – but now Facebook are going a step further in the fight against revenge porn.
It is super hard to get these images off of the Internet, and it seems like the world is over when it happens. Already 10.4 million U.S. citizens who have reported being a victim of this heinous crime.
However, Facebook has begun to catalogue the images reported as revenge porn, according to a blog post by Antigone Davis, Facebook’s Head of Global Safety. By cataloguing the image, Facebook is able to identify and remove the image if it ever resurfaces again!
“If someone tries to share the image after it’s been reported and removed, we will alert them that it violates our policies and that we have stopped their attempt to share it,” explains Davis.
Not only will this be in place on the Facebook app, but on Facebook Messenger and Instagram.
The process is just like how you would regularly report an offensive image on Facebook, however the person who is the victim of the crime must report it. It can’t be done on their behalf.