“I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 pm and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”
Thus spake Zuckerberg, and out of a boredom, intoxication and perhaps just a dash of malice, Facemash was born. From the earliest phases of its gestation, Facebook (née Facemash) was used as a place for anonymous douchebags like Zuckerberg to get off on “the idea of comparing two people together,” by rating people in a public forum without their consent. So as much as Facebook today purports to be the world’s largest hub of connectivity, at its core remains the premise on which it was founded: judging people. We all do it. Some of us just take it further than most.
In June last year, Josh Turner, a twenty-five year old from Bendigo, set up a ‘Benders Root Rate’ page on Facebook out of “boredom” and invited people to join the group and use it as a public forum to post both pictures and comments rating the performance of their past sexual partners.
Earlier this week, Turner pleaded guilty to charges of using “a carriage service” (in this case, The Facebook) to cause offence and using an “online information service to publish objectionable material.” On top of a six-month suspended sentence, he now has to complete 150 hours of community service, as well as a sex offender assessment for featuring sexually degrading content about children as young as thirteen on his page. Turner’s legal defence maintained that he didn’t moderate or filter the posts on the page and therefore his level of legal culpability is reduced, but I’m pretty sure ignorance (in facilitating this kind of forum) does not a valid excuse make.
What Turner did – providing a forum for people to air both their dirty laundry and grievances out of spite – is not only entirely reprehensible, but also recalls a similar highly-publicised case of ‘revenge/identity porn’ from earlier this year. Hunter Moore, the also 25-year-old behind US website “Is Anyone Up,” created a similar forum for disgruntled exes to post explicit photos of their previous partners alongside screenshots of their Facebook and other social media profile pages, effectively turning the usual user-generated porn site into an NSFW phonebook. Unlike Turner, Moore’s venture actually generated monthly revenue of up to $13,000 and 30 million hits at its peak. But unlike Turner, Moore expressed little remorse.
The good news is that both sites have since been shut down. Turner has been banned from Facebook for two years and Moore was stabbed by one of his IUA victims, vigilante-style (Selina Kyle, is that you?). However, The Bendigo Advertiser also reports that a police investigation has unearthed half a dozen similar sites and countless victims. Keep in mind that Turner’s site was a public page and there are (obviously) private, invitation-only groups with the same purpose; groups that admit members only on the basis that they share new content regularly.
Obviously these sites will exist in perpetuity as long as there’s a) the Internet and b) people are willing to take and distribute photos of themselves nekkid. I know people want to take pictures of themselves in compromising positions – that’s great! – but like Moore says, to do so is to play a dangerous game of Russian Roulette and there’s always going to be someone like him willing to make a buck off your mistake.
So next time you’re feeling frisky and are considering photo sexting your special man/lady friend, keep in mind an analogy that I know I’ve found it really helpful since I started working on The Internets and taking dirty pictures of myself (kidding): taking a photo (or writing something) on the Internet is like peeing in a pool – you can’t take it back, and no one wants to swim in your pee. If anything, I hope all this talk of urine is enough to make you want to put down the camera. I know I wish I could take it (this analogy, not a picture) back.
