Tag: news

Intimate Internet Violence – It All Started with Revenge Porn

Marines United led to many investigations and the first modification of the Uniformed Code of Military Justice in decades.  “Article 117a, UCMJ, colloquially referred to as the UCMJ’s “revenge porn” article, criminalizes the wrongful broadcast or distribution of intimate visual images. Article 117a was codified in response to the 2017 “Marines United” scandal in which nude images of female service members and civilians were posted on Facebook by military members

It all started with revenge porn. Intimate Internet violence. That no laws could stop.

When I began serving as the Public Web lead for the USAF in 2011, I became aware of a bizarre, but serious problem on official government social media accounts. Some couples who broke up practiced what was referred to as “revenge porn.” But they leveled up the game because publishing on their own social media accounts might only reach a few hundred followers. Since the goal was public shaming as a blood sport, many tried to leverage official government social media accounts for the military base or installation where they and their friends lived. So, the admins of the official social media sites of government organizations were playing virtual whack-a-mole denying the publication of insidious invasions of deeply private moments.

Revenge porn is the nonconsensual distribution of sexually explicit images or videos and sometimes without their knowledge that the images or videos exist.

Early Isolated Examples of “Revenge Porn”

A theater manager and photographer secretly took a revealing photo of Marion Manola, a Broadway star, and turned it into an erotic postcard in 1890. Manola sued the men, not wanting to be depicted as a sexual object. “Manola’s case was used as an example by jurists Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis when they argued for a new legal “right to privacy” in their landmark Harvard Law Review article that same year. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html

In 1903, because of another case involving the unauthorized use of a woman’s photograph, the New York Legislature enacted the first right to privacy in the US and across the common law world, including Australia and the United Kingdom.” https://theconversation.com/in-the-19th-century-a-man-was-busted-for-pasting-photos-of-womens-heads-on-naked-bodies-sound-familiar-168081

In the 1950s when Marilyn Monroe agreed to be photographed nude, but the photos were published in Playboy magazine without her consent in 1953. https://www.biography.com/actors/marilyn-monroe-playboy-first-issue-didnt-pose

In the 1980s, Hustler magazine ran a monthly feature called “Beaver Hunt” which featured nude photos of women submitted by readers. The images often included personal details about the women, such as their hobbies, sexual fantasies, or names, and some women sued the magazine for publishing their photos without permission.

Of course, when the ability to publish was limited by people who had money, means and magazines, the amount of revenge porn was relatively limited. Its explosive growth grew with the Internet. While the individual efforts to post partner porn on official Facebook accounts were usually successfully squashed by the admins or algorithms, the Marines United private Facebook group managed to slide under the radar for a while.

Marines United Facebook – Sharing Sexual Secret Braggadocio Videos

The Marines United scandal became national news in the spring of 2017. A closed Facebook group of some 40,000 members sharing bragging rights by sharing explicit images of their mostly female partners, many of whom were unaware their most intimate moments had been recorded. I wonder if they got their inspiration from the 1990s film Flatliners where one guy records a series of tristes and his fiancé discovers the video evidence of his indiscretions.

Marines United led to many investigations and the first modification of the Uniformed Code of Military Justice in decades.  “Article 117a, UCMJ, colloquially referred to as the UCMJ’s “revenge porn” article, criminalizes the wrongful broadcast or distribution of intimate visual images. Article 117a was codified in response to the 2017 “Marines United” scandal in which nude images of female service members and civilians were posted on Facebook by military members,” according to an article on MilitaryJusticeAttorneys.com https://www.militaryjusticeattorneys.com/blog/2019/october/ucmj-article-117a-criminalizes-revenge-porn-/

The victims from Marines United indicated horrible results from their undesired fame, including stalkers.

Intimate Internet violence through public shame and embarrassment didn’t stop there. It has resulted, not surprisingly, in several suicides.

Fatal Fallout From Publishing Private Sexual Secret Videos

Tyler Clementi’s suicide in the fall of 2022 was a tragic event that brought attention to the issue of cyberbullying and harassment of LGBTQ+ youth. He jumped to his death after his roommate secretly recorded a kiss between Tyler and another young man and posted the covert video to Twitter. His death sparked national conversations about privacy, bullying, and the need for greater acceptance and understanding.

His story also led to increased efforts to prevent bullying and support LGBTQ+ individuals. The Tyler Clementi Foundation, founded by his family, works to prevent bullying and promote safe and inclusive spaces for LGBTQ+ youth.

In 2024, Generative AI became a force for “mutilating” people’s images, creating fake pornographic images of them. This was a new “deep fake” twist on revenge porn, but the public shaming as a blood sport remained overwhelmingly painfully real.

Mia Janin, 14, took her own life after a group of boys bullied her, reportedly pasting girls’ faces on porn stars’ bodies and calling her and her friends the “suicide squad.” https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/girl-14-commits-suicide-boys-shared-fake-nude-photo-suicide-squad

Producing Porn Stars from Public Pics of Random People

In April 2024, Laguna Beach High School administrators launched an investigation after a student allegedly created and circulated “inappropriate images” of other students using artificial intelligence.

While some states have made laws specific to nonconsensual sharing of intimate images and the military’s Uniformed Code of Military Justice has criminalized this act, it seems like we could use better federal criminal law to cover this nationally trending trouble.

DC Dystopian Drift

The tax and revenue paying population of DC has been cut severely, while crime, homelessness, rent, school absenteeism are going up. All trends lead to dystopia. A body in motion at a constant velocity will remain in motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an outside force. Unless there’s a powerful, decisive action, this trend will continue.

We can tell the future. Isaac Asimov wrote a series of books called The Foundation Trilogy that suggested it would be possible to use math and science to predict the future not of any one individual but of major movements of socioeconomic movements. When you think about it, we already do this with things like the Federal Reserve Board trying to adjust inflation. When I do the math, the neighborhoods of our nation’s capital are heading for dystopia.

Let’s look at some of the math for the District of Columbia. In 1999, the population of DC was 521,000 people. In 2022, the population was 672,000. Over those 2 decades, the city increased by 151,000 or nearly 30%. This is just the residents. It does not include everyone who commuted daily to sit in the office buildings. Commuters from the city’s Maryland and Virginia suburbs used to raise the city’s daytime population to more than one million during the workweek.

However, during COVID all the federal employees left the office buildings in DC bringing the office vacancy rate in the District to a record high of just under 20%. The mayor of DC repeatedly asked the President of the U.S. to bring back the federal employees and he made an executive order, but by that time, the federal agencies had already created fully remote policies, coordinated them with a plethora of unions, and published them. Then they documented the positions that could be fully remote and codified them. Then they released building leases, reducing the various organizations’ expenses. It’s impossible to turn back the tide.

Total overall commercial bankruptcies in the U.S. increased 22% in the first quarter of 2024. Hundreds, probably thousands of small businesses in the district relied on those federal employees who have since left the district to remote work from the suburbs and many have moved out of the suburbs into remote areas. A total of 76% of establishments in DC (or a total of 18,224) were small businesses. When the commuters used to come in from the suburbs swelling the district population to more than 1M daily, they/we used to eat lunch there, often breakfast, and sometimes even dinner. We used to shop at pharmacies, and grocery stores, get gas, or do dry cleaning in the district. But that swell of commuters has significantly decreased, robbing thousands of businesses of life-sustaining revenues.

Taxes are also leaving the district. IRS data shows a pandemic-era exodus of mid-to-high earners aged 26-44 from DC, leading to taxable income loss. Migration data from the Internal Revenue Service shows that between 2019 and 2021, during the height of the pandemic, the District of Columbia experienced a net loss of over 16,000 tax-filing households, which equates to approximately 31,000 people leaving the city. This migration resulted in a net loss of more than $3B in annual taxable income so far.

While tax and business revenues are going down, while mid-to-high earners are leaving the city, violent crime is going up. As most major U.S. cities recorded decreases in murders last year, killings in the nation’s capital headed in the other direction: 274 homicides in 2023, the highest number in a quarter century, amounting to a nearly 50 percent increase since 2015. Killing is just one part of the crime spike story. Other violent crimes like carjackings are stealing headlines. Homicides, carjackings, and robberies across Washington, DC, have affected prominent politicians and regular residents alike, leaving many in the nation’s capital fearful of the rising crime. While other major cities saw a drop in a variety of violent crimes, the nation’s capital suffered a 39% increase last year.

Homelessness is also increasing in the nation’s capital. Last year’s data revealed roughly 9,000 people were experiencing homelessness– an 18% increase from 2022.

Rent is going up. Two real estate sites, Zumper and RentCafe, place the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in D.C. at just below $2,400. Zillow pegs it at more than $2,600.

Absenteeism among DC students is on the rise. Here’s a jaw-dropping number: 60% of D.C. high school students were chronically absent last school year.

Sadly, my conclusion of these trends is an irreversible spiral toward a dystopian community. However, that’s just for the nation’s capital and perhaps some other major cities. For the middle class and upper middle class who are taking on remote work, staying at home, and homeschooling their kids, life will begin to evolve more around their neighborhood in a way that it hasn’t since before women/mothers joined the workforce creating the dual-income household that is ubiquitous today, but that is another blog post.

https://ora-cfo.dc.gov/blog/irs-data-shows-pandemic-era-exodus-mid-high-earners-aged-26-44-dc-leading-taxable-income-loss

https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2024/03/07/high-school-student-absences

Renting In And Around D.C. Is Hellacious Right Now. Just Ask Your Neighbors
Listen: Will D.C’s homeless population continue to grow?

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/05/us/washington-dc-crime-carjackings/index.html