Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Sexual Teen Photos Showing On Porn Sites

Warning About Sexting - Explicit Photos Being Harvested From Social Media

Young people are warned they may lose control over their sexually explicit images and videos once they are uploaded to social media,  sometimes then showing up on porn sites, says a new report from the UK.

The warning follows a study by the Internet Watch Foundation. It shows 88% of the self-generated, sexually explicit online images and videos of young people their analysts encountered had been taken from their original location and uploaded onto other websites.

These original sources are usually legitimate 3rd party services, such as social networking sites or webcam sites.

The study, which was carried out using data collected throughout September 2012 by IWF Internet Content Analysts, aimed to establish a snapshot of how many self-generated, sexually explicit images and videos of young people there are online.

It also sought to discover how much of this content was copied from its original source and put on other websites.

These parasite websites had often been created for the sole purpose of offering sexually explicit images and videos of young people and therefore contained large amounts of sexually explicit content. A parasite website is defined as a website created for the purpose of displaying sexual content (images and/or videos) which have apparently been taken/harvested from the website to which they were originally uploaded. 

In less than 48 working hours, IWF analysts encountered more than 12,000 such images and videos spread over 68 websites.

Most of the images and videos (88%) appeared on ‘parasite websites’, meaning they were taken from the original area where they were uploaded and made public on other websites.

Sarah Smith, IWF Technical Researcher, said: “During the course of our work we encounter large quantities of self-generated sexual content which has been copied from its original location and then uploaded elsewhere to form collections, but this is the first time we’ve been able to demonstrate the extent to which this occurs.”

Susie Hargreaves, CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation, said: “This research gives an unsettling indication of the number of images and videos on the internet featuring young people performing sexually explicit acts or posing.

“It also highlights the problem of control of these images - once an image has been copied onto a parasite website, it will no longer suffice to simply remove the image from the online account.

“We need young people to realise that once an image or a video has gone online, they may never be able to remove it entirely.”

David Wright, Director of UK Safer Internet Centre at SWGfL, said: “Much of the advice for children and young people is, quite rightly, to not ‘sext’. However this research, coupled with our experience, demonstrates that it is still not uncommon. We hope that our new resource will help and support those who have shared self-generated content to take positive action.”

The research did not attempt to discover if the person/people in the images had willingly taken part, or were coerced, or knew the images were going to be uploaded to the internet. It aimed to provide a snapshot of statistics about the amount of content that is currently in circulation on the internet.

No comments:

Post a Comment