Sensemaker Daily
Ten years ago, nude images of dozens of A-list celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence and Kirsten Dunst were leaked online following an iCloud hack.
So what? They’re still all over the internet. Lawrence’s hacker went to jail, but her intimate images can be found on web pages dedicated to celebrity leaks. Those sites are making a profit, and many of them have one phrase in common – “the fappening”.
- The fappening is a grim nickname for the day those images first began to circulate online – a combination of “fap” (internet slang for masturbation) and the title of the M. Night Shyamalan thriller The Happening, about a plague. It’s now become shorthand for the abuse of women dressed up as porn, on dedicated “fappening” sites.
- Revenge porn is a common but flawed term for this type of abuse, given that it refers to explicit content that is shared without consent. Experts prefer “non-consensual intimate image abuse”. NCII doesn’t just impact celebrities; in 2023 there were 19,000 reported cases in the UK.
NCII is almost impossible to delete once it makes its way onto the internet. Sophie Mortimer from the Revenge Porn Helpline says there is a “dark underbelly” of people engaging with, downloading and reuploading stolen images. Celebrities in particular are seen as “fair game”. Fappening sites often ignore takedown requests from victims and, even if they do comply, it’s usually too late.
Who’s profiting? Once a footballer for Crystal Palace, Leigh Nicol’s entire camera roll – including explicit videos she’d taken consensually with a partner – was uploaded to the internet in 2019 after an iCloud hack. To this day she doesn’t know who leaked the images or why, but getting them taken off the internet has become a full-time job.
Tortoise investigated one of the fappening sites hosting Nicol’s NCII.
- The owner of that site is a far-right extremist and misogynist who tells his friends he works in “online marketing”. He has also shared a white supremacist terrorist manifesto on a far-right forum.
- The network. Since 2014, this individual’s real line of business has been celebrity leaks websites. He owns at least 23 of them, making an estimated $46,000 a year – and probably much more – from advertising and url sales. He takes care to hide his identity and his network of websites is spread across several different countries
- The enablers. The web host for twelve of this man’s websites is a company called Namecheap. When Nicol tried contacting it to take her images down it told her to address her “issue” with her “local legal authority”.
- More enablers. Often, NCII like Nicol’s is just a Google search away. Words like fappening are a shortcut to it. Google says combating NCII is a “priority”, but doesn’t want to censor it in the same way it censors child sex abuse material because it’s too difficult for the search engine to distinguish between consensual explicit content and NCII.
How to fix it? The law is playing catch-up. Uploading NCII is a criminal offence, but it can be hard to prove who actually pressed publish. Some fappening sites encourage anonymous users to upload their own content, for example.
Suing the people – and the tech companies – who own and host the websites is “almost impossible”, says Honza Cervenka, a solicitor at McAllister Olivarius. “The website operator may be incorporated in one country. The data is stored in another country. The company that owns the umbrella company could be in a third country… By the time you run the full list of everybody who's potentially involved… you’re looking at five, seven, ten entities in different jurisdictions.”
All the while, the images stay up.
What’s more. Thanks to generative AI, photographs can be turned into “nudes” with a single click. One expert warns: “We’re like six months out from an absolute apocalyptic wave of generative AI-based revenge pornography.”
