Facebook Confessions
About 6 months ago, an 18, or 19-year-old boy posted certain distasteful photographs of a girl from his college in Jodhpur, without her consent, on a Facebook confessions page. If you are not aware of the confessions page trend on Facebook, these are pages where a certain community is allowed to post anonymously — the messages need to be submitted on a separate hosting page, from where the page admin collects, sorts, and puts up posts.
Dangerous Liaisons
It has been 2 months since the ex-boyfriend of a 22-year-old girl started harassing and blackmailing her present boyfriend. During the period they dated, the girl and the former boyfriend visited several hotels to consummate their relationship. These moments were captured by the couple, and the images remained with the man. Once the girl broke up with him, and started seeing someone else, the former boyfriend threatened the new guy with publishing the said content online.
In the Hands of a Blackmailer
A 45-year-old woman could never have expected that her own nephew would indulge in maligning her so repulsively. The woman shared a relationship with a man, outside of her marriage for a while. She exchanged a couple of her intimate photographs with him, but was careful enough to delete the data. But almost two weeks ago, her nephew somehow recovered the deleted data, created a fake Facebook account, and started blackmailing her with the photographs.
Revenge Porn: Cyber-bullying at its Lowest
The reason behind narrating these rather unpleasant tales of misery and harassment is simple — one ought to know what revenge porn is, and hence be careful about not getting implicated.
Revenge porn entails a person posting online, nude pictures or private moments of his/her partner after a breakup, and is the growing instance of cyber-bullying and blackmailing.Yes, it is a rather difficult task to extricate social media from our lives today, but cyber-sociality also comes with its set dark rooms — situations none of us ever can be sure of proving detrimental.
It is understandable that when we are with someone, imagining your partner as a future-blackmailer, or harasser is the last thing that will cross your mind. Hence, sometimes we give in to documenting our private moments.
But the burgeoning cases of online harassment necessitates that we balance our social and online lives a bit more cautiously.
You have these student-run portals of colleges on Facebook called Confession Page wherein anyone can make an anonymous post. So students can easily post offensive pictures of their ex to take revenge. The admin is responsible here as he/ she is allowing the post. The victims of cyber-bullying are mostly women. We do have cases where guys are also harassed. For example the ex boyfriend harassing the current boyfriend threatening to post the private pictures of the girl or their intimate times online.
— Milind Agarwal, President of Cyber Crime Awareness Society
To err on the side of caution is prudent, but it is also rather pointless to endlessly blame the victim in these cases for being careless. To expect someone to be absolutely clinical while in an intimate, private moment is definitely easier said, than done.
Yet it becomes incumbent upon us to treat these incidents as cautionary tales for the unwarranted, and exercise discretion as much as possible.
Here’s a video of people reacting to revenge porn:
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