Google : protect survivors of online sexual abuse
Amnesty International Online Action Illustration
Woman and girls targeted with digital sex crimes inSouth Korea have had their
explicit images shared widely online without their consent.
Google's inadequate reporting system is making their suffering worse.
Survivors of online sexual abuse in South Korea have told Amnesty International
their suffering has been compounded by Google’s slow and convoluted system for processing content takedown requests.
In March 2020, journalists uncovered 8 secret Telegram chat rooms
where explicit images of women were being sold without consent.
One chat room operator was sentenced to 42 years in jail.
Recent criminal cases show that perpetrators habitually threaten survivors with existing video content to force them into producing more sexually abusive content.
What can be done?
Deleting non-consensual explicit content circulated
online is essential towards restoring the survivors' daily lives.
Google needs to move faster.
One survivor said:
“In order to delete videos, images and search keywords,
I had to take hundreds of screen shots and report these to Google. I couldn’t ask someone else to do all this for me because I had to attach these harmful images depicting myself when I reported them. I had to face it all alone.”
All tech companies have a responsibility to prevent harm from happening through services. This includes protecting survivors of digital sex crimes, by helping them quickly.
