The dating app Bumble launched a campaign to make cyberflashing illegal in the UK.
“Flashing is a crime. Online flashing should be, too.” This is the motto of Bumble’s campaign, aiming to criminalize cyberflashing.
Accountability matters. Today we’ve launched a campaign calling for the criminalization of #cyberflashing in England and Wales. If flashing is illegal on the street, it shouldn’t be tolerated in your inbox. #digitalflashingisflashing https://t.co/TXkBWwpQzc
— Bumble (@bumble) November 2, 2021
The term became popular in the last several years. It stands for the act of sending unsolicited, obscene image(s) to strangers over any form of online messaging, as Unilad explains. It could happen through various apps, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, as well as via Bluetooth services like AirDrop.
At present, there is no specific offense against this obnoxious practice in the UK. That is why the dating social network is urging the government to recognize cyberflashing as a serious crime.
As per The Modems, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Bumble’s CEO, stated:
“Now more than ever, we spend a considerable amount of our lives online and yet we have fallen short of protecting women in online spaces.
Cyberflashing is a relentless, everyday form of harassment that causes victims, predominantly women, to feel distressed, violated, and vulnerable on the internet as a whole. It’s shocking that in this day and age we don’t have laws that hold people to account for this.
At Bumble we’ve been taking steps to tackle cyberflashing for years. We built a Private Detector feature that captures and blurs nude images, and successfully campaigned to make unsolicited nude images illegal in Texas. But this issue is bigger than just one company, and we cannot do this alone. We need Governments to take action to criminalise cyberflashing and enforce what is already a real-world law in the online world.”
Cyberflashing in the country is a serious issue as nearly a quarter of all millennial women have been affected.
Have you been a victim of cyberflashing? Do you agree it should be illegal? Let us know in the comment section!