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Jasmine Singh
During the early part of this year, an automobile engineer was arrested on charges of posting nude pictures of his ex-girlfriend on Facebook. Recently, a 17-year-old girl in West Bengal hanged herself after intimate photographs of her were posted on the same platform. These are incidents that have put the focus strongly on ‘revenge porn’.
Looking at the growing number of incidents, last year Facebook launched a programme meant to combat the growing problem of revenge porn or non-consensual pornography.
However, the programme launched by FB, which asks you to submit your own nude pictures before anyone else uses it against you, is still under debate. The technology is known as perceptual image hashing, which allows reverse image searches on Google, it is the same technology that allows the spread of child exploitation through use of photoDNA. Youngsters, both girls and boys are not very sure on what can be done. How could they ensure that pictures clicked or videos shared while they are in a relationship wouldn’t be used as a revenge tool against them, if the relationship doesn’t work?
Sociologist Kanika Sahni, shares,“We have made everything, even intimacy a joke. It is okay to share a picture of a kiss or a cosy hug with friends, what the younger generation needs to know is that relations cannot be made on social media, yes, they can be stalked on it.”
Growing menace
Harmanjot Baath, 26, has been working as an online promoter in the music industry for more than four years; he comes across various fan pages where people (young boys especially) post old pictures of actors and actresses with their friends. “The first instinct is to establish the credibility of the picture, 70 per cent of the times they turn out to be morphed ones,” shares Harman. “I can either block the page or use other filters to keep such nuisance at bay, but this doesn’t solve the problem of revenge porn,” he adds. There are as many as 3,000 revenge porn websites across the world. Pictures and videos are often used to blackmail, extort money and seek sexual favours from the victim.
Be wary
Even though more and more countries are making laws to prevent this, youngsters feel without proper structured measures nothing can happen. Gurpreet Bajwa, creative designer from Patiala does not share clippings from party shoot unless the purpose is clarified through mail. jasmine@tribunemail.com
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