After their private photos were taken and posted on the social networking site Reddit, thousands of people are being tormented by an anonymous mob.
There are hundreds of discussions on Reddit where its 50 million users can host their own forums known as “subreddits,” most of them are geared toward women.
While some explicit pictures are copied from women’s Instagram and Tiktok accounts, other, more intimate images are frequently posted to the website by enraged ex-lovers.
According to a BBC Panorama investigation, there are frequently dozens of cruel and degrading comments underneath the photographs, including rape threats.
Many people spend a lot of time “doxing” women by exposing their addresses and personal information.
A journalist for Panorama Monika Plaha claimed she arrived at the website as a result of a tip-off and ‘felt nauseous’ browsing some of the discussions.
“The first one I looked at was centred on South Asian ladies and had more than 20,000 users, with comments in English, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi. The majority of the users appeared to be guys from the same community.”
I recognized a few of the women because they had sizable social media followings. Some of them I even personally knew.
There were over 15,000 pictures. We examined a thousand of them and discovered 150 distinct women in sexually suggestive images. In the comments, everyone was being sexually objectified and dehumanized. None of the women, I was certain, would have agreed to participate in this forum.
In another thread, a man offered to provide a complete collection of private images of a woman for £5, and another poster requested access to the woman’s social media accounts.
One victim, going by the name of Ayesha, claimed she was filmed by an ex-boyfriend without her permission and claims she discovered naked videos of herself placed on the website last year.
She experienced a surge of harassment after her information was posted online. Men demanded sex from her and threatened to disclose the tapes to her family because they knew she was from a conservative Pakistani background where sex before marriage was frowned upon.
She explained what had happened to her parents and claimed that they both experienced sadness after making an attempt at suicide.
One video was quickly removed after she made an attempt to contact Reddit, while another took four months to get taken down.
Himesh Shingadia, a manager at a major company with a college degree, was found by Panorama to be the Reddit user who started the site aimed at South Asian women, including Ayesha.
After getting in touch with Panorama and explaining that his subreddit was just meant to “appreciate South Asian women,” he erased it.
Reddit permits sexual imagery but has made an effort to crack down on non-consensual photographs in the wake of a number of high-profile occurrences.
When a collection of female celebrities’ personal photos were uploaded to the website in 2014, the site gained notoriety.
Four years later, the site’s censors disbanded a group that used “deepfake” technology to insert famous people’s faces into pornographic movies.
Reddit’s reputation as a popular platform hasn’t stopped the trend, which is seen as a continuation of revenge porn.
In December, it was revealed that the number of crimes using revenge porn in London increased by 329% over a 13-month period, with some victims as young as ten.
According to information provided by the Metropolitan Police in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOI) request, there were 698 more cases between October 1, 2020, and October 31, 2021.
Surprisingly, compared to the previous year, the number of victims between the ages of 10 and 17 doubled.
Reddit stated it had removed over 88,000 non-consensual sexual photos in 2021 and takes the problem “very seriously” in response to Panorama’s investigation.
It claims to have a team of employees working to find private photographs shared without the users’ permission. It also states that it frequently takes action, such as banning forums.
A representative said: “We are investing today in our teams, technologies, and procedures to meet this aim. We recognize we have more work to do to prevent, detect, and action bad content even more swiftly and correctly.