Indecent Images Traded Online

On 22 August 2022, BBC News reported a group of individuals using a social media platform called Reddit to trade indecent images of thousands of women, presumably without consent.

The group apparently went further than that in that they teamed together to try to identify the individuals before publishing their personal information online, which in turn resulted in the individuals receiving substantial unwanted contact from unknown individuals of a sexual and often threatening nature. The individuals involved in the page in question all hide behind the veil of anonymity that the internet allows. The BBC article can be read here.

The thrust of the article is that the criminal laws in respect of revenge porn do not go far enough to protect the victims as those laws tend to be limited to images shared between former sexual partners. Nelsons does not practice in criminal law and accordingly this blog is not intended to comment on whether this position is an accurate reflection of the criminal law. The suggestion was that the victims had little recourse to protect themselves. Whilst it is far from ideal, there are arguments that can be pursued in the civil Courts against perpetrators.

In our previous blog, we have discussed how the UK GDPR would treat incidents such as the Reddit page referred to by the BBC as set out above (there are plenty of other blogs discussing similar circumstances). That blog sets out the legal basis upon which victims can take action to stop their images from being shared by way of seeking an injunction and compensation for the damage caused.

As with any legal proceedings, the starting position is to identify who the target Defendant is (although, as a side note, it is possible to pursue a claim against ‘Persons Unknown’ in cases such as this and there is precedent for Courts allowing service of Court papers over social media platforms where the address of the Defendant cannot be ascertained – whilst this is technically possible, there is very little benefit for victims in the circumstances described by the BBC in proceeding with action without first identifying the perpetrators as otherwise there is no identified target against whom you could enforce any injunction/damages order once obtained).

The obvious and immediate target would be Reddit itself. It is suspected that once this group was made known to Reddit, they will have taken it down. If they did not take the page/content down, the individual victims would be able to force Reddit to do so by bringing appropriate Court proceedings as described in the Hunter Moore article tagged above.

This does however bring with it some jurisdictional issues. Reddit is a USA-based social media company. An argument would therefore have to be formulated as to whether the Courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction and whether the laws of England and Wales would apply. That is a complicated question without a general answer, as the answer tends to be fairly reliant on the circumstances of the individual case.

What is clear is that UK GDPR is to a point intended to apply to companies/organisations outside of the territory of England and Wales and accordingly it would be surprising if the Courts of England and Wales did not have jurisdiction for at least that aspect of the claim if the victim was located in England and Wales.

Comment

Pursuing Reddit may however only win the battle and not the war, as it will tackle the immediate problem (i.e. taking the images down from the page in question) but it will not tackle the individuals that have the image(s). Clearly, if Reddit handed over the personal information of the perpetrators to a potential Claimant, this too could be deemed to be a breach of data protection legislation.

It is however possible to seek a Court order (known as a Norwich Pharmacal order) requiring the social media platform to provide evidence as to the identity of the perpetrators. It may be that the social media platform can only provide details of the IP addresses used in response to such an order and that a subsequent application would need to be made to the internet service provider for the details of the individual who was using the IP address at the time in question. Therein lies the reason that it is stated above that the available civil route is far from ideal – this process is quite a costly one and accordingly justice in such a case is only likely to be available to those that can afford it.