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Celeb selfies hold up mirror to Net

The reactions of online communities show us more about ourselves than the victims.

Jon Tullett
By Jon Tullett, Editor: News analysis
Johannesburg, 17 Sept 2014

In late August, hundreds of images and videos of naked actresses hit the Internet. That is not, in itself, unusual - there are many Web sites dedicated to pictures of naked actresses. But these were special - they were private photos, taken for private consumption, and stolen from phones and cloud hosts.

The reactions were fascinating - of the Internet communities, of the actresses themselves, of armchair lawyers and real-world law enforcement. Those reactions tell us a lot about ourselves. Take a look.

The first reaction was the message boards on sites like 4chan and reddit, where communities erupted with the testosterone-fuelled glee usually reserved for teenage boys discovering Bing image search for the first time. The occasional lone voice questioning the actresses' rights to privacy was flamed into oblivion.

The actresses (and they were exclusively women) responded with a mix of outrage ("Hope you feel great about yourselves" - Mary Winstead), denial ("These so called nudes of me are FAKE" - Victoria Justice), and weary cynicism ("Thank you iCloud!" - Kirsten Dunst).

Roll out legal guns

Then they responded with lawyers. Sites hosting the images were tracked down and served with takedown notices. A lot of takedown notices. And while I'm not fan of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), it is an effective way to remove content you don't like, and sites started to cave fairly quickly.

But by then the damage was done, and there are hundreds of mirrors of the images online. A complete set of the leaked images and videos was, for a while, very nearly the most active torrent in the world, on the popular Bittorrent tracker ThePirateBay (it was narrowly knocked into second place by the timeous high-definition release of How to Train Your Dragon 2).

Meanwhile, the community swung into contradictory action, analysing the scanty evidence in the extraordinary detail we have come to associate with Internet sleuths. Sure enough, someone uncovered a likely candidate for the leak and the mob then proceeded to make his life a misery, as only 4chan and reddit can, rather than just turning potential evidence over to the authorities.

Wasn't us

Apple, whose iCloud service was suspected of being the source of the leaks, denied any possible involvement, then backtracked and pushed out a security update. There's truth in both sides there - iCloud probably wasn't solely responsible: the images came from many sources, some of which were definitely not iCloud. But iCloud did have, and still does have, vulnerabilities which allow attackers to guess ("brute-force", in hacker parlance) passwords and steal backed-up images, videos, and other personal data. eBay subsidiary Paypal took an opportunistic swipe at Apple when the latter launched the Apple Pay service. "We the people want our money safer than our selfies," crowed PayPal, which has had its own share of security problems. Glass houses, people. Put the stones down.

The FBI, meanwhile, had discovered that one of the leaked photos may have been taken while the subject was 17 years old, enabling it to up the ante to one of child pornography. That step was the nail in the coffin for many of the sites hosting the images. It's one thing to push back against leaked nudes of grown adults - I'm told that's actually legal in the US, leaving lawyers resorting to making copyright claims and exerting DMCA takedown notices. But no reputable site wants to be found hosting underage nudity, and they responded quickly.

One of those to respond late was reddit itself, the self-proclaimed "front page of the Internet" and the place where, after 4chan, most of the leaked photos had originally been shared. Reddit, in case you're unfamiliar with it, is divided into channels ("subreddits"), dedicated to almost any topic you can imagine.

World news, science, embroidery, exotic fish... and creepy photos. The site has a long and well-nurtured reputation for tolerating, and indeed encouraging, the sharing of material of questionable taste. You want surreptitious cellphone photos of strangers? Sexualised images of girls who have suffered violent crime? Bestiality? Reddit's the place to go.

The site does cave to legal demands on occasion, though, and child porn is usually the clarion call for action. The "jailbait" sub, dedicated to pictures of young girls, was taken down when it was found to house - to absolutely no one's surprise - underage images. So was the "creepshots" sub, home of sneaky cellphone pics, for the same reason.

Except creepshots was promptly reborn as "candidfashionpolice", where the exact same images are posted, with a thinly disguised "fashion commentary" justifying the pictures: that thin veneer of deniability is enough for the reddit admins. It's worth noting the site didn't take down the leaked selfies (dubbed "the fappening" by reddit users) before it had gained a gigantic amount of traffic, ad revenue, and paid user subscriptions from the incident. Lucky coincidence, no?

And of course the twitterati held forth, condemning and justifying the leakers and sharers. Now, if there is one argument which holds no water for me at all, it's the excuse that because actors (some of which may take their clothes off on-screen anyway, the sluts) encourage cultish celebrity media, they somehow deserved to be exposed this way too.

Nothing wrong

That feels like the Internet equivalent of blaming a rape victim for wearing provocative clothing. Let's be clear: there is nothing wrong with taking sexy images of yourself. And there is a great deal wrong with so egregiously invading someone's privacy. Nothing justifies it, no matter how famous or previously naked they may be.

Nothing justifies it, no matter how famous or previously naked they may be.

Yes, they were stupid. Sharing nude pics is naive. Phones get stolen or hacked all the time, jealous exes distribute pictures after a breakup, images get sent to the wrong recipient by accident. Just because these were public figures, it does not absolve them of that, but it doesn't make it right either.

And please remember that naked selfies is hardly a celebrity phenomenon. There are Web sites, with enormous galleries dedicated to hosting and sharing stolen images of ordinary people, many of them underage girls - the darkweb hosts one of the best known, accessible only through the Tor privacy service (and no, Tor is not to blame). There are hacker bulletin boards offering leaks-as-a-service, breaking into cloud accounts to find compromising images (and presumably keeping other personal data for other use).

In all this, I'm continually reminded of Adam Savage's superb podcast: Talking To My Kids About Sex In The Internet Age. "The Internet hates women," he concludes, and resolves to teach his boys to stand above the standards of behaviour exhibited online. Good advice for all of us, if this incident is anything to go by.

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