How to have your say on cyberbullying

  Facebook is ramping up its efforts to combat the spread of non-consensual “revenge porn” images across its main website, Instagram and Messenger, it confirmed this week. The move expands on a pilot scheme announced last year that asked any users who were concerned about the spread of intimate images to proactively upload them using the encrypted Messenger service, where photo-matching technology could prevent further sharing. The social network has stressed it does not store the images long term, but instead keeps their unique fingerprint, or “hash.” Initial tests rolled out to a small number of users in Australia last November. On Tuesday, Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, shared more details about how the plan had evolved in recent months. Now, the website is working closely with safety, survivor and victim organizations across in Canada, the U.K. and U.S. to help stop private moments being shared online without permission. “It’s demeaning…

  MERRIMACK – A Manchester man wanted for allegedly posting “private sexual images” of an acquaintance on the internet turned himself in to Merrimack police. Officials said Wednesday that Aaron Mattil, 29, of Six Mulsey St., was charged with one count of nonconsensual dissemination of private sexual images, a Class B felony. He was booked at police headquarters and later released on $2,500 personal recognizance bail pending arraignment, which police said is scheduled for July 5 in Hillsborough County Superior Court-South in Nashua. Police said they issued the warrant for Mattil’s arrest earlier this month, shortly after the alleged victim filed a complaint. “It is alleged that Mattil disseminated private sexual images of an acquaintance … without their consent,” police said. They said Mattil allegedly posted them via text message. According to their archives, Merrimack police arrested Mattil on April 23, charging him with two counts of violation of a…

  Roughly six-in-ten U.S. teens have been bullied or harassed online, according to a new Pew Research Center report that explores teens’ experiences with cyberbullying and their views about it. Senior Researcher Monica Anderson discusses the methods and meaning behind the data. Bullying has been around for decades, centuries even. Cyberbullying is a newer manifestation of bullying. How did you define cyberbullying for this research? We’re aware that cyberbullying can be a very nuanced issue. Our own research has shown that what might be harassment to one person might not be considered harassment by another. Monica Anderson, senior researcher at Pew Research Center At the same time, other studies may use different measures to assess the prevalence of cyberbullying. For this project, we measured six specific incidents that teens might face online or on their cellphone: offensive name-calling, rumor-spreading, being sent explicit images without their consent, having explicit images of themselves…

  PORTLAND, Ore. (PRWEB) September 25, 2021 October is National Bullying Prevention Month, and Learning.com has launched a cyberbullying prevention campaign to stand in solidarity with students against cyberbullying. With national data reports showing cyberbullying on the rise, especially in public schools, the digital literacy leader has created a cyberbullying prevention toolkit for educators to download and help students and parents do their part in promoting online safety and good digital citizen skills. To download a complimentary toolkit, visit https://lrng.co/2ChQDIf Learning.com’s special toolkit offers digital materials that help bridge the gap between school and home to help keep students safe online. Resources in the kit are K-8 age-appropriate and include online safety lesson plans, a home and school checklist, a cyberbullying prevention guide, a classroom student pledge poster, Be Kind Online stickers, and a shareable infographic to help teachers, students, and parents do their part in preventing cyberbullying. “It has…

  Singing duo LOZT visited Saint Paul’s Catholic High School in Wythenshawe, Greater Manchester, this week, to deliver a mental health, online safety and cyber bullying themed message. The duo LOZT (pronounced ‘lost’) comprises Lauren Scudder from Orange County, California, and Tom Ryder from London, UK. Both solo acts in their own right, the pair have come together to blend genres, voices and cultures. In the past few months LOZT have performed in notable venues around the UK and are in the midst of recording their debut album with double Grammy award winning producer Robbie Nelson. Their act is soulful Americana with strong harmonies and witty, heartfelt lyrics. The students watched a unique and entertaining performance from the artists, which was followed by a mental health and online safety educational message. The main message of the presentation empowers students to make the right choices in regards to online safety and…

For years, Anon-IB, the internet’s most notorious epicenter of revenge porn, thrived as users posted nude photos and videos of women without their consent. They published these images under the assumption that they were anonymous—their usernames were “Anonymous” followed by a string of letters. A new heatmap visualization using IP adresses of Anon-IB users highlights that people who share revenge porn on the forum weren’t as anonymous as they may have thought. In March, cybercrime teams from the Dutch police seized the Anon-IB forum as part of an investigation. Einar Otto Stangvik, a Norwegian security analyst, turned the IP address data—strings of numbers that reveal the location of a computer connected to the internet—that he collected before the seizure, into a heat map of where people were posting from. Stangvik shared much of the data, which spans from February 2015 to January 2018, with The Daily Beast in January. Across…

  Thanks to the availability of apps like Facebook and Instagram, sharing content online has become second nature. But there’s a dark side to this trend too – revenge porn. Sadly, as internet-connected technology becomes more freely available, this phenomenon is on the rise. Here’s everything you need to know about it.   What is revenge porn? It involves someone posting explicit photos and/or videos of someone else online against their wishes. This includes both images and videos obtained without the victim’s consent (i.e. using hidden cameras or by hacking their devices) and those obtained within the context of an intimate relationship. Why is it called revenge porn? Due to a string of court cases in which embittered lovers posted photos and videos of their ex-partners without their consent. These exes were motivated by a desire to cause their former partners emotional distress as revenge for some slight – either…

  “Just because the victim is a man and the suspect is a woman this time, the country is investigating the case differently,” wrote one petitioner, according to the JoongAng daily. “Remember the cases of women who were victims of hidden camera crimes and went to the police for help?” wrote another. “They would be told, ‘Well you had it coming to you, because you didn’t dress modestly’ or ‘We can’t catch the culprit. It’s too hard’.” For years, South Korean women have been victims of what was described by the Korea Expose website as a “spy-cam porn epidemic”. They have been secretly filmed in public bathrooms, changing rooms, or a camera has been pointed up their skirt on an escalator, and the footage is then posted online. In 2016, the police closed down Soranet, one of the most notorious websites for hidden camera footage of female body parts, and…

SEOUL: A man in his 30s has been found guilty of posting nude photos of his former girlfriend on social media in an apparent “revenge porn” scheme. Busan District Court on Sunday handed down a jail term of 1 1/2 years to the man for spreading private sexual images without consent. The court said it took into consideration how the suspect had no previous criminal records and had already paid compensation to the victim. In December last year, the man allegedly created a fake social media profile impersonating his ex-girlfriend and posted nude photos of her with obscene comments. The man told investigators he decided to post the nude photos, as his former girlfriend had been avoiding contact with him in an attempt to break up. The fake profile was taken down afterward. However, the photos had already been circulated on other networks and websites. The victim has reportedly been…

  The Dutch police recently located and shut down the servers of Anon-IB, a message board notorious for revenge porn, i.e. nude photos that have been obtained and reshared without the owner’s consent. In 2011 nude photos of Emma Holten, a Danish feminist activist, were hacked from her email account and posted online, including on Anon-IB. She later received international attention for how she chose to handle the situation, by publishing a nude photoshoot of herself, in an effort to emphasize the difference between consensual and non-consensual sharing of personal data.     “It’s both terrifyingly interesting and interestingly terrifying” According to VICE, TNW Conference is quite the event   In wake of Anon-IB’s closure, TNW talked to Holten about what this means for victims of revenge porn and how shutting down Anon-IB was a milestone for fighting it. What Anon-IB represented Before it was shut down, Anon-IB was a…

A growing number of teenage girls are being approached online by fake model recruiters who lure them into sending indecent images of themselves, which are later used to extort money. Facebook and Instagram accounts are being set up in the names of leading model agencies such as Storm Model Management, which discovered Kate Moss and represents Cindy Crawford. Girls receive messages from someone who claims to be recruiting for the agency; they are encouraged to send topless photos or conduct a Skype interview in which they are asked to remove their clothes or wear lingerie. Sarah Doukas, the managing director of Storm, said that in the past two years the number of calls the agency had received about scam agents had risen from one a week to almost daily messages. “The rise of social media has impacted greatly on why modelling agency scams are increasing,” Doukas said. “Firstly, a lot…

  Google has always allowed people to request certain content, like a malicious website or copies of your contact information, to be removed from search results. The company already had a policy for removing private images or videos, but now it’s taking fake pornographic content more seriously. Google now has a support page dedicated to removing “involuntary fake pornography,” with instructions that people can follow to report said content. For a request to be accepted, the person reporting the content has to be the person depicted in the fake imagery. The company notes that this process only removes the requested content from Google search results, not from the sites actually hosting it. This updated policy is likely in response to the growing popularity of ‘deepfakes’ - sexual videos and images where someone’s face is substituted for another person’s (usually a celebrity). As the name might suggest, deepfakes are generated using…

A Colorado law designed to punish people for revenge porn — posting intimate photos of former lovers or spouses on the internet typically following a break-up — has resulted in nearly 200 charges since it was passed three years ago, but securing convictions and guilty pleas has been a challenge. There have been 192 misdemeanor cases for non-consensual pornography filed since House Bill 14-1378 became law in July 2014. Just over a third of those have resulted in guilty pleas or verdicts, reflecting the difficulty of proving the cases but also, possibly, weaknesses in the law. While law enforcement officials and victims advocates praised the law’s success, they remained measured because, The Denver Post found, many cases have been either dismissed or set aside in plea-bargain deals. Also, it doesn’t appear anyone has yet used the law’s strongest tool at punishing someone for allegedly posting nude photos of ex-girlfriends or…

  Facebook has publicly released its most complete community guidelines to date after many years keeping the specific rules its moderators used to govern the platform secret. The update tacked over 5000 more words onto the already unwieldy document, which now includes highly specific examples of banned or heavily regulated content. Is any of it at all surprising? Well, yes. Most platforms have rules that outline common-sense genres of content they’d rather not be liable for - harassment, hate speech, gore, child endangerment, etc. - and these are no different. But as a reflection of its size and global reach, Facebook’s guidelines include some of the most granular examples of what not to do online. Cannibalism is off limits. “Sexualized massages” are specifically barred. Staged animal fights won’t fly, and neither will videos of animals being processed for food. Images of buttocks or an anus are a no-go, “unless photoshopped…

  Surat: Two separate cases of women being blackmailed and harassed by men through social media have been registered with the city police on Monday. In one complaint, the accused made abusive comments on the woman’s Facebook page to defame her. In the other case, the accused issued threats to share the photos of the woman on social media if he was not paid money. Tushar Patel, a resident in Parvat Patiya, was booked at Puna police station for making abusive comments on Facebook page to defame the complainant woman and her mother. The accused was booked for harassment and also under the Sections of the Information Technology Act. The woman alleged in her complaint that the accused made the comments to tarnish her image with the intention to break her engagement. The complainant had recently got engaged to a man according to the wish of her family. The woman…