[DECODED] Why gamifying abuse impacts all of us
In case you missed it, Rappler published a two-part investigative series over the weekend uncovering an online community that exploits women by sharing their intimate photos and videos without consent. The online forum called NSFWPH, which launched in April 2023, claims to have amassed 430,000 registered members and nearly 9 million posts and comments — all to share and consume voyeur content.
What’s more troubling, apart from the non-consensual sharing of intimate content featuring unwitting women, is that the members of this forum deliberately post and contribute to the forum as a point of pride.
Posts in the forum showed that many of the members of NSFWPH consider their participation a badge of honor, considering the lengths that they go to in order to obtain intimate photos and videos from women they know or interact with.
PART 1: How Filipinas’ intimate moments end up on a 430,000-member forum
Some even shared how they manipulated women into sharing nudes with them, which were in turn rewarded by the other forum members through congratulatory comments.
The forum treats these exploits, betrayals of trust, and, in some cases, content theft, as achievements that catapult a member’s “status” on the platform. The more a user shares and interacts on the platform, the more they get points that place them higher in NSFWPH’s ranking system.
This system has a name: it’s gamified abuse.
Because the higher a member ranks in the forum’s merit system, the more privileges they unlock, such as access to locked content or additional information about the victims, like their names or links to their Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Part 2: Gamified abuse: How a PH forum rewards submissions of non-consensual intimate content
In the case of NSFWPH, Filipinas were the victims. But the same business model is being used by bad actors across our current online ecosystem, targeting everyone vulnerable — including men.
Research and advocacy groups Reset Tech and Equimundo recently published a report called “The Grift Economy,” which examined how male loneliness is being monetized through membership schemes and so-called educational products. The report outlined how those in the “manosphere,” a collection of online communities focused on masculinity, are being pulled in with content that aligns with their ideologies, until they are drawn deeper into grievance-driven communities and, ultimately, monetized.
We see parallels in how the Grift Economy gamifies the exploitation of men’s need for connection to how the NSFWPH gamifies the exploitation of women’s intimate images and videos. Both employ these three mechanisms:
- Points system turns participation into a game.
The NSFWPH forum gamifies its members’ participation by assigning them ranks. The Grift Economy explains how manosphere communities assign similar status systems in the “brotherhood” system. Such practice keeps members engaged, because they are rewarded through their participation.
- Online platforms are active financial beneficiaries.
The Grift Economy points to online platforms as “usually the single largest financial beneficiary of any given operation.” This is because they share a portion of advertising income with the creators who run the ads that target vulnerable men.
In NSFWPH’s case, the result is a multi-layered monetization model. “The forum’s gamified system rewards users for uploading intimate content, while traffic and advertising turn exploitation into profit,” Rappler writers Gelo Gonzales and Lance Ariel Bustos said.
- The problem is not limited to one platform.
Rappler’s investigation found that one of the most prominent members of NSFWPH is diverting the voyeur content he posts on the forum to a separate website where he set up pop-up ads that he can directly earn from, and to his own membership-based channel on Discord, a separate messaging and communication platform. By doing so, he is able to charge for more exclusive content.
The same is true for the Grift Economy. They thrive on different platforms, including YouTube, TikTok, X, Kick, Telegram, Instagram, and Spotify.
This practice makes the entire operation resilient: if one platform goes bust, other online communities will be able to absorb the operation, especially if they have lax policies against abuse and exploitation.
Gamified abuse is a business model, and it scales the way it does not only because of the bad actors that exploit them, but for the lack of accountability from the online platforms in which they thrive.
This makes all of us who spend time online vulnerable. – Rappler.com
