'Disgusting': Teen whose images were used online calls for clearer complaints procedure

A teenager who found images of herself used on a sordid Twitter account said that a clearer complaints procedure would have made dealing with the abuse easier.
'Disgusting': Teen whose images were used online calls for clearer complaints procedure
Ciara, not her real name, now aged 17, knows about 30 girls whose images were abused on the same Twitter account

A teenager who found images of herself used on a sordid Twitter account said that a clearer complaints procedure would have made dealing with the abuse easier.

Ciara, not her real name, now aged 17, knows about 30 girls whose images were abused on the same Twitter account which was permanently suspended last week after multiple complaints.

Some of the girls were as young as 12 in the pictures, Ciara said.

She is not a Twitter user and she would never have known that images of her were being objectified and shared online had friends not stumbled across the account and alerted her to it.

“I was pretty shocked," the 17-year-old from Dublin said. “When I scrolled down the site I found a post that had been up about me for a month and I never knew about it. That was quite upsetting. It made me aware that I could be on other accounts and I don’t know how I’d find out about them."

Ciara said that the Twitter account was both disgusting and upsetting but that she was not overly shocked because she had seen abusive accounts on other platforms like Facebook and Tinder before, where people stole her friends' identities, setting up fake profiles in their names.

But Ciara was shocked by how young the girls pictured on the account were and by how many pictures were posted.

“I know more than 30 of the girls on the account and many of them were about 12 in the photos," Ciara said.

And there were hundreds of posts. There were 20 posts made in one day sometimes. It must take up most of your day to do that.

Ciara, whose Facebook account was already set to private, blocking people she does not know from seeing her page, said that the photos were taken from her Facebook profile pictures, going back years, which were the only images viewable by a stranger.

“It’s so wrong to use photos of people without asking them and the comments were really, really disgusting, they were horrible to read. And the fact that they had retweets makes me feel even more gross."

Accounts on Twitter can be made anonymously, so there is no way of telling who is really behind the account's profile picture. But Ciara said that those commenting on her account “were mostly 50-year-old men and had pictures of their families in their profiles.

It’s so blatant and open.

Ciara said that Twitter does not have a specific category to complain about these types of accounts, adding one would be helpful.

"You see weird stuff that’s not nice on all sites but if it was easier to report it and quicker action was taken to remove it that would help," she said.

A spokesperson for Twitter said that the company "has zero tolerance for any material that features or promotes child sexual exploitation".

"We aggressively fight online child sexual abuse and have heavily invested in technology and tools to enforce our policy," the spokesperson said. "Our dedicated teams work to ensure we’re doing everything we can to remove content, facilitate investigations, and protect minors from harm — both on and offline."

Twitter said that it has specific forms for reporting unauthorised images and for child sexualisation and exploitation and that action will be taken on all accounts which violate the company's rules.

Noeline Blackwell of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre said that creating a clear and effective complaints procedure to tackle online abuse must be a priority for the new Government.

"The world we live in is as much virtual as physical right now, and you can’t ignore the propensity for crime online," she said.

Our legislation is pre-internet so therefore it has no concept of how to properly protect people online. It can deal with a Snooping Tom in a physical world but it can’t deal with them online.

"We want to impress on all of the parties going into the next government that this is no small thing. This is actual abuse. It causes real harm and it is not a victimless crime."

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