Reddit nudes marketplace a ‘new evolution of revenge porn’

Tens of thousands of men are sharing and trading intimate photos and videos online of women who have not given their consent.

An investigation by the BBC found that “thousands” of photos of naked or partially dressed women are being shared on the user-led aggregation site Reddit, often accompanied by “sexual and degrading language”.

And while the men teaming up to share the photos lurk “behind a mask of anonymity”, the women being targeted have also found their addresses, phone numbers and social media handles published online – a life-threatening practice known as “doxing”.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“What I found was a marketplace,” wrote the BBC’s Monika Plaha. She described the phenomenon as being like “a new evolution of so-called revenge porn”.

The trading of nude images and footage of women is now so widespread that experts have named it “collector culture”. “This is not a phenomenon of perverts or weirdos or other oddballs who are doing this,” Clare McGlynn, a law professor at the University of Durham, told the BBC. “There are too many of them, and it’s tens of thousands of men.”

Panorama investigation

The topic is the subject of a new Panorama investigation being shown at 8pm on BBC One this evening called The Secret World of Trading Nudes. In the episode, Plaha manages to track down the man responsible for creating a Reddit forum targeting South Asian women that is “awash” with explicit material.

Several women told Plaha that Reddit had not done enough to help them get their image removed from the platform. Some had to wait eight months for content to be deleted, while others said their images were never removed.

Reddit responds

Reddit told the BBC that it had removed more than 88,000 non-consensual sexual images in 2021 and said it takes the issue “very seriously”.

A spokesperson for the platform said the subreddits referenced by the BBC are banned and that safety teams would continue to remove communities that flout the rules. The platform has “strict policies against non-consensual intimate media, as well as dedicated safety teams that use a combination of automated tooling and human review to find and remove this kind of content”, they said.

The spokesperson added: “We know we have more work to do to prevent, detect, and action this content even more quickly and accurately, and we are investing now in our teams, tools, and processes to achieve this goal.”