Along with longer days and an unquenchable urge to consume as much rosé and/or cider as is humanly possible, another inevitable side-effect of the weather finally heating up is the not-so-subtle leers you get from blokes who can’t seem to control themselves now you’ve – shock horror – taken off your tights.
Bare legs and shoulder-exposing and low-cut tops that show off your tan seem to act like catnip to sex-starved men in the summer. But if you thought those wolf whistles on your way to work were disturbing enough, imagine this: an online group set up with the sole purpose of persuading guys to secretly screen-shot summer selfies you’ve innocently posted to Facebook and share them with thousands of faceless users for a mass perve session. Yep, welcome to ‘Facebook Cleavage’– the shady subreddit thread with 21,117 users and growing.
‘Summer, summer, summer time,’ is the caption to one picture of two women’s holiday snaps, cropped crudely to show just their breasts. ‘She’s perfection. No doubt. Excuse me while I clean up this drool,’ reads another posted by someone with the username LetsGetWheystead. (Banter, right?) A third sums up the vibe of the group right now: ‘Bikini season is my favourite season,’ next to – you guessed it, a picture of this user’s Facebook ‘friend’ sitting in the sea in her two-piece.
Oh yes – these guys are having fun times. All thanks to pictures you’ve posted to show off your holiday shots to mates back home. Smug, maybe – but not an excuse for blokes you forgot you were even still friends with to steal and share with total strangers.
Sadly, ‘Facebook Cleavage’ isn’t even new to the internet – the group is now over a year old – but it’s come under fire recently for being the latest in a series of misogynistic sub-threads to spring up on Reddit’s UGC forums.
Last week, the people behind Reddit finally agreed to shut down an infamous thread dedicated to sharing pictures and stories of ‘beatingwomen’, which had been started three years ago by one of the site’s most notorious users David_Berkowitz, named after the American serial killer from the 1970s who killed six people.
Despite featuring images of a woman’s bloody and bruised face with the caption ‘Shit makes me horny’, the general manager of Reddit had initially resisted blocking the thread, saying: ‘We’re a free speech site with very few exceptions (mostly personal info) and having to stomach occasional troll reddit like /r/picsofdeadkids or morally questionable reddits like/r/jailbaitpics are part of the price of free speech on a site like this.’
It’s the same argument they use for allowing ‘Facebook Cleavage’ to continue to exist – as long as the person you’ve stolen the picture from is over 18, unnamed and the picture came from Facebook, you’re not violating any Reddit rules. So it can’t be removed.
And before you think about going to Facebook to complain, the new rules about photo privacy they released last week won’t help. Facebook say
– even creepshots – as they have been made publically available. In other words: as long as you put them out there, there’s nothing you can do via Facebook to stop your pictures turning into shots that are being perved on by strangers all over the internet.
To find out just how easy it is for so-called ‘friends’ of yours on Facebook to do this, I decided to try it out for myself – infiltrating the group by posting pictures of myself that I’d already uploaded to Facebook. The rules are startlingly simple:
1.) Find sex pictures of your hot friends on any social network. Upload them to imgur.com, and submit them here.
2.) Doesn’t have to be cleavage. Any sexy pic will do.
3.) Don’t post pics that don’t come from Facebook. You will be banned.
4.) Only post people of age. Underage posts will be removed. And user banned. Report underage posts to the mods.
5.) Absolutely no names.
So far so easy. So taking some pictures of me on holiday and a couple of selfies for good measure, I posted the pictures under the thread title ‘pictures of my brunette friend stolen from Facebook’ and waited to see if any honourable users call me out on my blatant theft. Instead, an hour or so later, I got a message saying: ‘mmore please’.
Skirting, for a moment, around the creative spelling, I write in the thread asking for the ‘best’ way to get around ‘my brunette friend’s’ privacy settings and obtain more pictures to share. It didn’t take long for a response from another user who suggested I figure out who ‘her’ best friends are and ‘go through their pictures, they might not have the same privacy settings’.
Scarily, the user was right – when I search for myself on a general Facebook account my privacy settings prevent anyone I’m not friends with from seeing my pictures, but when I go on some of my friend’s profiles, I discover dozens of pictures of me that they’ve uploaded which are easily viewed by anyone who wants them.
Including a picture of me with some serious side-boob from five years ago – which I’m not exactly thrilled her friends can even see, let alone strangers online. It does make me think though that where I’d initially dismissed the idea of my 534 Facebook friends stealing creepshots from my account, can I be so sure about their friends – the number of which must run into thousands?
Back on the subreddit and people are now beginning to share pictures that they think I’ll enjoy. One user says, ‘I used to jerk off to a girl that looked like that’ and another posts ‘I bet she’s into anal’. How you can tell that from a picture of me on the beach in the South of Italy on a holiday I went on with my family I’m not sure.
There are plenty more posts like mine that have obviously been lifted from Facebook, but there’s also a much darker undercurrent on the thread that doesn’t adhere with the administrator’s rules. For a start, there are plenty of pictures that seem to be genuine ‘creepshots’ – pictures that have actually been taken of a perfect stranger without their permission.
These include pictures of women bent over in supermarkets revealing a inch of thong and of women bent over and innocently revealing their breasts – despite the group’s strict rules that users ‘will be banned’ for posting pictures that don’t come from Facebook. There are also many women who have been named in full and a small but significant number of girls who appear to be underage, or ‘coming of age’ as one user puts it.
As for the ease of getting the posts removed once you’ve discovered your pictures on the page, I’m still waiting. To date, Reddit have neither responded to my press request for comment nor the complaint I made to the administrators about my pictures being posted without my permission. I’ll be removing the post this afternoon myself, but what’s to stop some unscrupulous friend of a friend of mine doing it again?
Puts those leery comments you’ll get on the commute to work tomorrow into perspective, right?
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophiecullinane
Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.