The photos and video in question, taken when the anonymous woman, dubbed ‘Jane Doe’, was 16, were posted by a vengeful ex-boyfriend in 2019. Doe immediately alerted Reddit that the sexual videos and photos featuring her image had been posted without her knowledge or consent, but the social network reportedly dragged its feet in taking them down. She said sometimes they waited “several days” to look through the questionable content.
Worse, the woman’s tormentor was allegedly permitted to not only remain on Reddit but to continue posting from a new account when his own account was banned. This forced Doe to single-handedly monitor the 36 subreddits on which her ex-boyfriend was posting smut featuring her image.
“Because Reddit refused to help, it fell to Jane Doe to monitor no less than 36 subreddits — that she knows of — which Reddit allowed her ex-boyfriend to repeatedly use to repeatedly post child pornography,” Doe’s lawsuit reads.
It added that the company’s “refusal to act has meant that, for the past several years, Jane Doe has been forced to log on to Reddit and spend hours looking through some of its darkest and most disturbing subreddits so that she can locate the posts of her underage self and then fight with Reddit to have them removed.”
Not only is Doe charging Reddit with its mishandling of content featuring her image, she’s asking other victims of ‘revenge porn’ scenarios like the one she is currently facing to join the lawsuit. Anyone who similarly had photos taken of themselves underage and posted publicly without their consent or knowledge may come forward, the suit reads.
Reddit is also accused of distributing child pornography, failing to report child sexual abuse material, and violating the Trafficking Victim Protection Act.
Unlike other social media sites that either built in a content system barring child porn or agreed on a moderation-based policy, Reddit didn’t even ban child porn until 2011 – and, then, only “grudgingly,” according to Doe – and subreddits featuring child porn are still often taken down only when they gather sufficient media interest to make it more advantageous to delete the porn than to keep hosting it.
Reddit has an internal ‘Anti-Evil team’ responsible for programming algorithms that flag abusive content in the hope of having it removed before it is seen by any of the site’s 52 million daily users. Its Trust & Safety team deals with less urgent violations, but also enforces its content policy and – allegedly – removes content with “urgent legal or safety implications,” often receiving grey-area content from the Anti-Evil team.
The lawsuit claims the US received 18.4 million reports of child sex abuse in 2018, with the lion’s share to be found on the internet. Some 37% of child sexual abuse content online is hosted in North America, and a disturbing 22% of child porn consumers are themselves under the age of 10. Children aged from 10 to 14 constitute over a third of child porn consumers. On Reddit, the problem is exacerbated by the ease of skirting the platform’s age-check mechanism.
Inevitably, media coverage of the scandal mentions the EARN IT Act, introduced last year by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), which critics say essentially bans encryption and is one of the last ways to – theoretically, at least – prevent government paws from rifling through one’s data.
The only problem, as child advocates point out, is that by the time the perpetrators are snagged by the police, the abuse has often already happened. Opponents to the law point out that it harms independent content creators while doing nothing about the problem of child sexual abuse.
Meanwhile, Reddit has allegedly become much more tame in recent years, broadening its horizons from scrubbing out child porn to deplatforming political subreddits such as the popular r/DonaldTrump forum – and gaining media attention when investment bankers called for fire and brimstone to be rained down upon r/WallStreetBets for muscling in on their money game.
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