Immediately when I opened this person’s account, I felt like I was punched in the stomach. It was late at night after I was done editing and posting pictures, so I didn’t want to wake up my husband. There’s nothing wrong with these pictures alone, but there is something wrong with the context. There were over 4,000 posts of kids with their shirts off. The girls had bathing suits, but 90% were boys from the ages of 6-12. Then, I noticed that my son’s picture from the tournament just a couple days before, as well as the picture I took of his team, were on there. I checked to see if there were any descriptions on these pictures and there were none. No backlinks to the original posters. My son’s pictures (and another teammate of his) were downloaded and posted on the page.
I thought, okay. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe it’s another kid that wants to post pictures of strong kids to motivate them or something (I don’t know). But then I started really thinking about this. Why in the heck would anyone download thousands of pictures of kids? So, I started really digging into the people that this account follows. This person was following 1,891 accounts of kids and sports photographers. All of these other accounts look like they were started by a parent to show off their child’s achievements, show them flexing their arms and muscles. Nothing pornographic, just really innocent. And these accounts were open accounts, non-private. These were the accounts from which this person was taking content from without permission, without the parents even knowing – like me.
Then, I started digging into the 461 followers. This is where I wanted to throw up. They were mostly older, adult males with fetish pages. These men are following thousands of little kids’ accounts (mostly prepubescent boys) and commenting some vile things. I immediately started taking screen captures of the followers and the followed of this account. Then, I messaged him.
‘Why did you post two pictures of my son and thousands of half-naked kids on your site?’
