Man jailed for spreading ‘revenge porn’ - ASEAN/East Asia

  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…

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) — The attorney of former state Sen. Nicholas Kettle believes the case against his client was mishandled because the man who accused him of extorting sex and blackmail is related to a state trooper. The extortion charges against Kettle was dropped this week after the new evidence was filed in the case, including Facebook messages between him and his accuser spanning three years that showed a friendship, according to DiMaio. “The tone [of the messages] is completely opposite of what he was testifying to,” DiMaio added. Kettle was charged with two counts of extortion and blackmail after he was accused of extorting sex from a male page at the Rhode Island State House. DiMaio said then-Attorney General Peter Kilmartin didn’t properly examine the case, which changed in January after the current attorney general, Peter Neronha, took over and gave the case a fresh look. According to DiMaio,…

 HAGERSTOWN, Md. - Cyberbullying is an ongoing issue for many young people but a phone company is working to stop it with the #LaterHater campaign. So many young people silently struggle with cyberbullying, whether it is on social media or video games; However, Billie Bertier, who is in college to become a student counselor, says staying silent is the worst thing to do. “Talk to anyone. You could talk to a friend. Talk to friend’s parent. It doesn’t always have to be your parents. I know a lot of students are scared to talk to their parents about these types of situations but talk to anyone and they will be able to help you,” Bertier said. Back in 2016, AT&T launched their later-hater website to provide another outlet to those dealing with cyber-bullies. The site offers counseling and tips for victims. “A lot of the kids, they are not…

  Just 12 people were convicted of sharing revenge porn in the West Midlands last year. It became a criminal offense to disclose private sexual photographs and films with intent to cause distress in April 2015, but numbers of prosecutions and convictions resulting from the new law are still low. The founder of a helpline for victims, which is receiving thousands of calls each year, said poor responses from police, as well as victims fearing reprisals or people finding out, may be behind the low number of convictions nationally. In the West Midlands police force area, there were 13 prosecutions for revenge porn in 2017, leading to 12 convictions. This was down from 24 prosecutions and 22 convictions in 2016. Of those prosecuted in 2017, five were men aged 25 or over, three were men aged 21 to 24, one was a man aged 18 to 20, one was a…

  JEFFERSON CITY — A bill that criminalizes sharing private sexual images without consent is one vote away from going to Gov. Eric Greitens’ desk. The Senate unanimously passed a House revenge porn bill with a vote of 33-0. Sen. Gary Romine, R- Farmington, who brought the bill to the Senate, said the legislation has been in the works for years and is not a reaction to any high-profile cases. Romine did not specifically mention the governor, but he and several lawmakers alluded to the governor’s impending court case. Greitens has been charged with a felony for allegedly taking and transmitting a photo of a seminude woman without her permission before he was elected. He denies the allegation. A House committee is also investigating the report. “This has not been a knee-jerk reaction,” Romine said. Proposals to enact similar legislation have “been around quite some time.” The Senate’s version makes…

  The bill would not only have made the nonconsensual dissemination of sexually explicit images a misdemeanor, but it would have also helped victims sue web platforms for failing to remove the offending images. It’s that last part that appears to have lured Google and web-hosting sites into the fray. According to the New York Post, the Internet Association—the self-proclaimed “voice of the internet economy” and a lobbying group that works on behalf of Google, Amazon, and many other tech giants—lobbied hard against the bill. What the Post calls its “11th hour campaign” led the state Senate to take no action on the bill before leaving for summer recess, effectively killing the legislation until next year. The bill had already passed the Assembly, and New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, had pledged to sign it, which is why advocates for its passing are understandably frustrated by the loss. “Big Tech, especially Google,…

  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…

  Camryn Cowdin was checking her Facebook page when she saw hateful posts from a person she considered a friend. Her name was never used, but she knew the words were about her. “He would directly reference a comment or situation that happened between him and I,” Cowdin, 16, said. He threatened to end their friendship. He’d say, `You’re dead to us.’ ” The comments left her feeling depressed, Cowdin said. She cried every night. She didn’t want to go to school. “He pretty much tried to ruin me,” said Cowdin, a student at Highlands Ranch High School who loves making costumes for Comic Con, journaling and music — a set of headphones often hang around her neck. “I know a lot of beautiful people who have been ruined by social media.” Cowdin’s experience of being bullied over a social media platform is part of an increasing national trend in…

  Back in 2010, most people weren’t familiar with the term ‘revenge porn’. It hadn’t yet entered the pop culture lexicon, but over the next eight years it certainly would as everyone from high school students to A-List celebrities fell victim to one of the digital age’s biggest downsides. Arguably the first place the phenomenon was birthed was the website Is Anyone Up?, founded by Hunter Moore. The high school dropout, former band manager and sometimes DJ originally started the site as a type of chat forum, however, its specialty quickly shifted to revenge porn. As shown in the documentary Hunter Moore: The Revenge Pornographer the site soon exploded from a niche portal shared among scorned lovers, to something Moore claimed grew from 50 hits a day to 100,000. And then, millions. Yet it was one of Moore’s victims, Kayla Law, who realised something was off. Well, besides the fact…

  A Utah man is facing voyeurism charges after he allegedly created a fake Facebook profile of a 21-year-old East Idaho woman and posted nude photos of her. The victim told a Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office deputy in March 2016 that her ex-boyfriend, Curtis Robert Bauss, 25, had taken photos of them during sex with her knowledge. × Story continues below video The victim had the photos in her possession, but she told the deputy Bauss had taken them off her devices. Bauss then reportedly created a false Facebook account under the victim’s name and posted the pictures. The victim contacted Facebook, which removed the account. She said Bauss had also been harassing her with text messages. When the deputy attempted to contact Bauss, he texted the victim saying law enforcement had no jurisdiction where he was. The Facebook profile was recreated with the pictures a day after the deputy…

  Britain will tackle “the Wild West elements” on the internet from cyber-bullying to online child exploitation by introducing new laws for social media companies, digital minister Matt Hancock said on 20 May. Launching a consultation on what measures should be used to ensure the safety of those using the internet, Hancock said the government would publish a white paper — a policy document that sets out proposals for future legislation — later this year and aim to bring in new laws “in the next couple of years”. Better regulating social media companies has long been an aim of a government that has struggled to carry out its agenda with Britain’s departure from the European Union taking up much of ministers’ time. “Digital technology is overwhelmingly a force for good across the world and we must always champion innovation and change for the better,” Hancock said in a statement. “At the same…

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…

An article about the website Anon-IB recently garnered national attention when dozens of male Marines posted nude photographs of their female colleagues. Anon-IB—short for Anonymous Image Board—is one of many “revenge porn” websites that encourage users to post explicit photos of their exes, without the exes’ consent. Anon-IB receives 50,000 individual visitors each day and its page views can average 170,000, according to the New York Post. The site’s categories include “drunk/passed out,” “peeping toms” and “up-the-skirt” photos. Some material depicts molestation and rape, with many of the girls pictured below the age of 18. Users can post teenage girls’ pictures, as long as the tag does not contain their age, according to the New York Post. Revenge porn epitomizes the failure of legislators and policymaking to catch up with the rapid progression of technology. Georgia resident Brandon Lee Gary, for example, had been convicted for taking up-the-skirt photos of…

  “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…

  A Williamsport woman charged with distribution of child pornography is accused of uploading explicit images from a minor’s cellphone onto the internet. Ashley Nicole Grove, 28, was charged this week by summons for an incident first reported by the victim on Jan. 2, according to the charging document filed by the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in District Court. One of the charges was under Maryland’s revenge porn statute. The teenager told investigators that Grove posted the photos of her performing sexual acts on a male to Facebook, the document said. The victim said “she had several broken cell phones which she gave to” Grove, the document said. The victim told investigators that she gave a subscriber identification module (SIM) card to Grove, unaware that it contained images of her nude and having sex, the document said. The victim said Grove posted the images on her Facebook page on Dec….