Many people contact Fight the New Drug to share their personal stories about how porn has affected their life or the life of a loved one. We consider these personal accounts very valuable because, while the science and research is powerful within its own right, personal accounts from real people seem to really hit home about the damage that pornography does to real lives.
A woman recently reached out to us and explained that explicit images from when she was 15 years old still exist on porn sites today, with little hope of getting them removed. This is her story.
Please don’t share my name or have my photos on here, but you can share my story.
When I was 17 years old, I was stalked by a much older man. He took over many social platforms I had, including Facebook.
Related: Pornhub Refused To Remove Videos Of This Minor’s Sexual Assault—Until She Posed As Her Own Lawyer
Little did he know, when I was 15, I sent nude photos over Facebook messenger to an ex-boyfriend. I was so young and stupid. Years later, at 19, this older man went from stalking me in person to cyberstalking me, and this was when he finally somehow found those photos. He proceeded to share them everywhere online.
My worst fears realized
I still remember people messaging me about them. No one knows I was only a kid in those photos, no one knows the pain and hurt that is deep from this.
My photos are on multiple porn sites. And I have tried EVERYTHING to get them removed. Even the police officer who worked with me tried. My real name is unique, so I can’t even deny them under my name and claim it’s someone else.
I’m so worried because I have kids now and I have no idea what to do to have them removed. People who run porn sites have no real idea of the true damage they cause by porn—when I found these photos on sites, reading through the comments made me so sick, so ill!
The number of views on these images has made me feel so stripped of my innocence. My cyberstalker still to this day has them under my Facebook name. I don’t even have a Facebook anymore, personally, but he runs my old account.
Yet to be helped and heard by porn sites
No one has any idea of how little help is out there for the victims of revenge porn, actual rape porn, and my situation of private images getting onto porn sites, which used to be rarely heard of but is more common these days. There are so many other reasons why I hate porn. I just can’t understand why people would watch it, not even caring if it could be someone’s actual worst moment.
Because my actual worst moments are on display for the world to see.
–H.
The reality of nonconsensual porn
It might surprise you to learn that nonconsensual porn is not uncommon.
“The first thing people need to understand is that any system that allows you to share photos and videos is absolutely infested with child sexual abuse,” Alex Stamos, professor at Stanford and former security chief at Facebook and Yahoo, said to The New York Times.
Last year, the newspaper investigated the rise of child abuse material online and discovered tech companies aren’t putting their efforts toward monitoring for illegal imagery.
The investigation looked at companies and tech platforms, including social media platforms. Facebook, they found, does scan for illegal material and reports the majority of flagged content by tech companies, but even they are not using all available resources to detect harmful or illegal content.
Related: More Than 80 Men Were Sexually Exploited And Secretly Filmed For This Guy’s Porn Site
The reality is, it is very difficult to remove images or videos once they have been shared online. Angela Chaisson, Principal at Chaisson Law, told us in an interview that getting images removed from a porn site like Pornhub is next to impossible:
“I will often tell a client that it’s just not worth the effort that it takes, which is a very unsatisfactory thing to say to a client as a lawyer. It’s like whack-a-mole. If you get them taken down from one place, they pop up in another.”
There are methods porn sites could utilize to proactively monitor for illicit content and prevent it from being uploaded in the first place, but as far as reports and evidence suggest, sites aren’t using these tools to their fullest abilities. Despite many sites’ claims of being proactive with removing illicit content, there is little evidence to suggest they monitor content uploaded to their sites, but instead, they mainly rely on users to report illegal content once it’s already been posted.
Related: Their Private Videos Were Nonconsensually Uploaded To Pornhub, And Now These Women Are Fighting Back
The main problem with content moderation that largely relies on reporting after it’s been posted is it puts the burden on victims to find, flag, and fingerprint their own abusive images or videos. This process can be traumatic, and then after all of that effort, it isn’t guaranteed to work.
Many victims, like the woman who just shared her story, have repeatedly contacted porn sites with removal requests, only to be met with silence and inaction.
Monitoring content is an investment and generally not one that brings a monetary return—in fact, it’s often the opposite. But it’s the responsible and ethical thing to do, and the very least porn sites can do since they knowingly or otherwise profit from exploited individuals and nonconsensual content.
The bottom line is that consumers can never truly know where the content they’re viewing has originated from. This is why we raise awareness on the harmful effects of porn and its ties to exploitation, child porn, and child abuse.
