In a new documentary about “Girls Gone Wild” — a franchise that consisted of VHS tapes and DVDs of girl-next-door types exposing themselves and participating in pornographic scenes — several of the women who were featured as teenagers come forward. Now in their 30s and 40s, they say they were coerced into being filmed or were too drunk to consent. They talk about the trauma and harassment they continue to experience.
“There was a lot of Zimas in and out of my system,” says Lori in “Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story,” who was 16 at the time she was captured flashing a camera in 1999. Another woman, Danille, who was 18 when she was filmed, says that a cameraman blocked the exit to the room she was in, and that “I was so naïve I didn’t realize I could say no.” Most upsetting, a woman named Janet says the harassment that followed her after her appearance on “Girls Gone Wild” was so impossible to get away from, “there were times where I felt so embarrassed that I wanted to, like, kill myself. I didn’t want to be here. You can’t escape it.”
Trista, who explains that she was intoxicated when she consented at age 19 to being filmed and has no memory of it, says, “Back then, you didn’t think about social media. You didn’t think about the internet. You could do what you wanted without having to worry about it coming back.”
Because of social media, the decades-old humiliation of these women is now permanent. The footage from the show, which was ubiquitous in the late ’90s and early 2000s, is online. Many of the women in it got very little compensation — in some cases, a hundred bucks, a T-shirt, a hat. Some who say they were filmed without their consent or filmed when they were underage won settlements, and the Department of Justice was successful in bringing charges against “Girls Gone Wild” in 2006 for failing “to create and maintain age and identity documents for performers in sexually explicit films.”
But others — even girls who were filmed when they were as young as 13 — did not receive restitution. Some women still get creeps sliding into their DMs 20 years later because they were once featured in a “Girls Gone Wild” commercial. Imagine if your identity were forever tied to something that happened for nine seconds before you could drink legally.
Meanwhile, Joe Francis, the man who created “Girls Gone Wild,” profited handsomely from it; as of 2023, he was living in a lavish, 45,000-square-foot beachfront estate in Punta Mita, Mexico. Francis has no regrets about the show because he frames himself as a champion of personal freedom. “All women are independent in their thinking and all women make their own decisions,” he explains in the last moments of the documentary. “Women in ‘Girls Gone Wild,’ they choose to be in ‘Girls Gone Wild.’”
As I was watching the documentary, Meta, the social media company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced last week that it was ending its fact-checking program and changing its content moderation guidelines. Though a lot of the commentary on the company’s new guidelines has focused on the dismantling of fact-checking as a way to cozy up to an incoming Trump administration, I’m much more concerned by its more hands-off approach to content moderation. That’s because I worry that it will lead to even more sexual harassment of young girls, and make possible an even freer market for their exploitation and coercion.
In a video explaining the changes, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, talked about the importance of “free expression.” “The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down,” he said.
Meta denies any changes have taken place in the substance of its policies against child nudity, abuse and exploitation and nonconsensual imagery, and says it will continue to have tens of thousands of staffers devoted to safety and security. The company also touts its parental supervision tools, which can be useful — if teens have parents who are engaged enough to know about them, and care. I’m far more worried about the most vulnerable teens, who don’t have the luxury of savvy adults guiding them.
There is already a lot of “bad stuff” directed toward young girls that the company’s previous systems missed. My newsroom colleagues Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Michael H. Keller have written about the men who use Instagram to groom child influencers. They found that even when parents reported violations to Meta, including evidence such as photos of erect genitals and pictures of their children reposted with explicit captions, the company often failed to act. “Former Meta trust and safety employees described an organization overwhelmed despite knowing about the problem for years,” Valentino-DeVries and Keller wrote in February.
I asked Arturo Béjar, a former engineering director who did two separate stints at what was then called Facebook — he was responsible for the “Protect and Care” team, and consulted from 2019-21 on the well-being team at Instagram — what he thought about the moderation changes at Meta. “ They’re taking away the most basic protections from the people who need it the most,” Béjar told me. “Users are now allowed to, for example, refer to ‘women as household objects or property,” CNN’s Clare Duffy wrote, citing language that’s been struck from Meta’s hateful conduct policy.
In 2023, Béjar testified before Congress that in 2021 he had informed Meta executives that sexual harassment of young teens was rampant on its platforms. “We had identified the disturbing fact that 13 percent of Instagram users aged 13-15 self-reported having received unwanted sexual advances via the platform within the previous seven days,” Béjar testified, adding, “Looked at over time, it is likely the largest-scale sexual harassment of teens to have ever happened, and one that clearly calls for action.”
The harassment, Béjar explained, often happens in direct messages, which are even more challenging to regulate. In 2024, Meta introduced stricter messaging settings for children under 16, including tools to “help protect people from sextortion and other forms of intimate image abuse.” But Béjar is skeptical that these tools are useful. For one, users lie about their age.
Additionally, the tool “blurs images detected as containing nudity and encourages people to think twice before sending nude images,” according to Meta’s description, but this friction does not actually stop an underage person from sending or receiving the images.
At this point, we are living in a “Girls Gone Wild”-saturated culture, where the humanity of young girls is completely taken for granted by bad actors who can spread coerced or manipulated images across the globe with very few roadblocks. And we know that teenagers have been passing around digital sexual images without consent since cellphones became ubiquitous.
To be clear, this is not just a Meta problem. TikTok, Google and other search engines have their own issues when it comes to the large-scale harassment of teenagers. The teenagers in question usually have very little recourse, just as it was 20 years ago. “The point of ‘G.G.W.’ was to detach a girl from her sense of agency, to take it away and own it in perpetuity for profit,” Scaachi Koul, a co-executive producer of the documentary, wrote in Slate.
Over time, it seems that the tech giants who are among the richest people in the world have less and less desire to take any sort of social responsibility. Their attitude seems to be that “freedom” is the most important thing, and if a few people get trampled along the way, that’s the cost. But it’s always going to be the youngest and least powerful people who lose.
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The post Freedom From Harassment and Exploitation on Social Media, but Not for Girls appeared first on New York Times.
