Exploitation Is Never Okay · 2:50am Sep 25th, 2020
Exploitation Is Never Okay
There has been a growing trend in recent years to target people for various reasons and exploit them in various ways online.
One example is long term harassment/ cyberbullying campaigns where people target people online to bully and harass and even call the police on them or show up in the real world to bully or harass them in person.
There have been a good amount of suicides linked with targeted harassment campaigns. A lot of people will use the excuse that they were mentally unstable anyway or the deserved to die, in the threads where people discuss these campaigns together. The reality is, if someone commits suicide because what you've done, you are an accessory to murder. And you can get life in prison for that.
There have been recent cases of people directly being linked to the suicide of people they targeted and getting life in jail. While free speech should be protected and I'm a huge advocate of freedom of speech, there is a difference between that, and targeting someone to stalk, harass, and drive to suicide.
No matter how much people want to make the excuse that it's free speech, it's not. It is murder. And the people who were sent to jail for life for bullying and harassing people into killing themselves, knowing exactly what they were doing, deserve to be behind bars.
There is also sexual exploitation. There is a trend of people pretending to date people they don't like to get elicit pictures of them and using them as a form of blackmail or leverage over them. This recently happened to a good male friend of mine and has happened to some other male friends over the years.
The people who exploit people this way often use it to humiliate people for having different political ideologies or to force them to pay money in exchange for not sharing their pictures online. A lot of people will make the excuse that it's the person's fault for sharing the pictures in the first place. But it's not. The person never expected to have their pictures shown to others. It's not their fault they shared pictures and the other person violated their trust.
In reality, when you share pictures like that without permission that's a type of sexual exploitation. It's also digital trafficking and revenge porn. Depending on how the person is attacked by people who view the images, it is also a form of threat as well as harassment. The people who view the images, knowing it is revenge porn, are also at risk of getting jail sentences. Many of these offenses carry life sentences in prison
Sometimes people will even get forced into doing cam work or sex work because of the blackmail people have against them. Many people get trafficked this way digitally and also physically trafficked because the blackmail is held as leverage over them and they are afraid to go to the police. So they become easy targets to traffick and once they have been trafficked it's extremely hard to get out.
No matter how much you don't like someone, it's never okay to bully, harass, have a targetted campaign against someone. or sexually exploit them online.
If anyone is a victim of these things, I encourage you to reach out to local law enforcement. Take good screenshots of the evidence and submit it to your local law enforcement agency.
It's never okay to exploit people online. People can exercise their right to free speech and say whatever they want. But when people target someone they don't like and sexually exploit them or drive them to suicide, those are crimes. And they should be reported.
