How the internet became a web of spite and revenge

The web is becoming an increasingly bitter and dangerous place, especially if you are a beautiful young thing, or a scorned ex, says Louise O’Neill

The photos had respectable origins, first appearing in the Washington Post in an article about the surprisingly warm weather Sochi was experiencing during the winter Olympics. One photo showed a young volunteer, wearing blue ski pants and a navy shirt pulled up to expose her midriff, her eyes closed as she leans against a banner that reads ‘Sochi 2014 — Hot. Cool. Yours.’

The photo was posted to Reddit, a social networking service and news website that, along with the image-board website 4chan has been described as the ‘front page of the internet’, boasting over 3 billion page views a month. Within hours, Reddit users had tracked down the Sochi volunteer on Facebook, and posted her real name as well as numerous photos of her in her bikini, leading one user to comment that “I knew that chick was looking for this attention.”

This practice of exposing an internet user’s identity is known as ‘doxxing.’ The term was derived from the word ‘documents’, and refers to the personal documents that are used to reveal someone’s details. ‘Doxxing’ is considered poor form by many internet users, as illustrated when Adrian Chen of the website Gawker wrote an expose on the Reddit user Michael Brutsch, otherwise known as Violentacrez. Brutsch’s most enduring contributions to the Reddit society were two subreddits called ‘Creepshots’, where users uploaded covert photos they had taken of women in public, without their knowledge and ‘Jailbait’, which was dedicated to photos of young teenage girls, often in bikinis or short skirts. When his identity was exposed, many Reddit users were outraged and banned Gawker. As Kevin Morris of the Daily Dot has commented, “Doxxing undermines the community’s structural integrity: Reddit simply would not exist as we know it if users weren’t operating under the freedom of a flexible identity. So redditors aren’t banning Gawker to protect Violentacrez, they’re doing it to protect themselves.”

The irony of this is that the protection of anonymity seems only to be afforded to those who are behind their computer screens, not the women who dare to be attractive on the internet. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of ‘Revenge Porn’, when nude or topless photos, explicit texts or emails, or videos of a sexual nature are distributed online without permission in an attempt to humiliate their victims. The victims can sometimes be male (as the recent case with ex-Lions rugby star Andy Powell illustrates, in which his wife, Natasha Gascoine, tweeted lewd text messages he had sent her in an attempt to reconcile after she discovered Powell was cheating on her) but the majority of targets tend to be women.

The photos are uploaded to revenge porn websites by spurned ex-boyfriends or hackers, the most infamous of these being the now debunked IsAnyoneUp.com. It was launched in 2010 by the then 24-year-old Hunter Moore, who described himself as a ‘professional life ruiner’. After first verifying the subject of the photos he received were over 18, Moore posted them online to the delight of his 350,000 unique visitors every day, who would taunt the victim. Moore included the girl’s name, profession, her Facebook account, and the city she lived in, ensuring that whenever someone searched for the victim on Google, the salacious photos would appear.

Thus Jill, a kindergarten teacher, found her school bombarded with naked images of her taken by an ex-boyfriend with messages such as ‘You have a whore teaching your children.’

Tina, from Northern California, had her medical records compromised, and photos of her bloodied breasts after surgery were uploaded. At least two women have killed themselves over revenge porn, with Cyber Civil Rights Initiative studies showing that 47% of victims contemplate suicide. What was Moore’s response? “I’m sorry that your daughter was ‘cyber-raped,’ but, I mean, now she’s educated on technology.”

For years, Moore’s website and its ilk were protected by the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which does not allow websites to be held accountable for user-submitted content, with Moore responding to ‘cease and desist’ orders with an email saying ‘LOL’ or a photo of his penis. But after IAU victims found that just before their photos ended up on the site, their computer files had been hacked by a certain [e-mail], the FBI began investigating Moore and in January he was indicted on 15 counts of felony amid allegations of conspiracy to hack into private accounts.

Also in January, Israel became the first country to make revenge porn illegal, with the Australian state of Victoria, and the American states of New Jersey and California also instating laws to criminalise the issue. One can only hope that further legislation will be introduced, and that Moore’s public announcement of his desire to relaunch ‘Is Anyone Up?’ (and include driving directions on how to get to the victim’s homes) is never realised.