When someone Inês Marinho Trust shared an intimate video of her online in 2019 without her consent, comparing it to a chronic illness that she would have to live with for the rest of her life.
First, the video was shared via WhatsApp, then Telegram and Twitter. It eventually made its way to popular porn platforms including Pornhub and XVideos.
“My face was not visible, but my name was on it,” said Marinho, who is based in Lisbon, Portugal. After struggling with every platform to get the video taken down, Marinho founded an organization called #NaoPartilhes (#DoNotShare) that helps other people who have faced this type of abuse and organizes teaching sessions in schools.
She also launched a campaign to raise awareness about the phenomenon across Portugal. In the first two days, she said she was inundated with more than 500 stories from people who had experienced “image-based sexual abuse” – an umbrella term that includes deepfake pornography, upskiting and revenge porn. Researchers predict that there are still thousands of people across the EU – mostly women, but also men and people from LGBTQ communities – who are affected by this type of online harassment.
There is no European law that enforces the removal of videos or images uploaded to pornographic platforms without their subject’s consent. But across Europe, people like Marinho hoped the landmark Digital Services Act (DSA) would change that. A proposal buried in the text – called Article 24b – outlined new rules requiring people who upload content to porn platforms to verify their accounts with a phone number and email address. The article also allegedly forced the companies behind the platforms to hire and train more moderators on image-based sexual abuse and require them to remove content flagged by victims “without undue delay”.
But during the 16-hour negotiations that lasted from Friday evening to Saturday morning last week, the proposal was brushed aside. Sources involved in the negotiations told WIRED that the measure was swapped out in political negotiations at the last minute. This has disappointed women’s organizations across Europe, even as MEPs publicly celebrate the Digital Services Act’s victories.
“As always, online abuse of women and girls is being marginalized and minimized, and I think that’s what we’ve seen here,” said Clare McGlynn, who specializes in image-based sexual abuse at Durham University in the United Kingdom. “It’s not taken seriously.”
In particular, Article 24b was intended to draw attention to mainstream porn platforms, where much of this content ends up, says Shanley Clemot McLaren, co-founder of a French group called Stop Fisha. (Fisha is French slang for ‘openly shamed’). Passing this Section 24b within the DSA would have been necessary not only to symbolically and legally recognize the victims, but also to highlight the offenses committed [are being committed],” she says.
To reach an agreement on the DSA, representatives of the European Parliament, the European Commission and the European Council had to reach a political compromise. “Demands from the EU Parliament, [the Council] just didn’t want to accept too many,” a source involved in the negotiations told WIRED. “So Parliament has to choose which one to prioritize in order to compromise.”
