Over 1,000 People Charged With Sharing Underage Revenge Porn on Facebook

More than 1,000 people in Denmark are now involved in a police case over the sharing of underage “revenge porn” – videos or images often made with consent but shared publicly without it to shame those involved.

Over 1,000 people were charged with sharing explicit content without consent in Denmark after the police delved into what appears to be yet another "revenge porn" case, this one with the added grim twist that the images may be considered child porn.

According to a Mashable report, an unknown person posted two sexual videos and an image of two 15-year olds on Facebook Messenger, the social network's private chat service. The videos immediately went viral as users recklessly spread them around the network and soon more than 1,000 people — 800 males and 200 females — were involved in porn sharing through the simple click of a mouse.

The police claim the explicit content was posted without the consent of those depicted — a practice commonly referred to as "revenge porn." By itself this is harassment, but this incident could go even beyond that, considering the age of the victims.

Officially, the age of consent in Denmark is 15, Mashable notes, but explicit material can be classified as "child porn" in Denmark even if those depicted are in their 20s.

"It's a very big and complex matter that has taken a long time to investigate. Not least because of the large number of charged. We have taken the case very seriously as it has major implications for those involved when such material is spread. And it must be stopped," said Police Inspector Lau Thygesen of the North Zealand Police in a press statement.

Revenge porn became a criminal violation in Denmark just last year — now people who share explicit images of their ex-lovers without their consent can go to prison for up to two years.

While this kind of revenge is undoubtedly a condemnable action, whether all those people who hit the "like" and "share" buttons also should be perceived as accomplices is still a matter of debate. This particular case illustrates the issue like no other: if sharing material on social networks is a crime, then an incredible amount of people will have to go to jail. One could argue that the police and courts should concentrate on catching and punishing those who upload such materials in the first place.

Facebook seeks to eradicate revenge porn by rolling out a set of reporting tools that should prevent non-consensual intimate imagery from being posted on its platforms: Facebook, Messenger or Instagram. The pilot program is now in a test phase, available in Australia, the US, the UK and Canada. The social media giant is attempting to perfect their moderation mechanism, which involves both AI and human reviewers, so that prohibited material can be removed so swiftly that perpetrators can't even share it in the first place, Mashable reported.