According to an ambulance worker, Twitter would not take her picture off a website where its 133,700 followers may choose the ladies they wish to sleep with.
After learning about the website two weeks ago, Abbey Desmond, 25, discovered that almost 100 strangers were debating whether they would choose to sleep with her or her closest friend.
Unauthorizedly using a picture from her own page, a new account she had never seen before asked its followers to “choose one” female. “Rate which one you’d prefer first, the blonde or the brunette,” Miss Desmond said.
“This is awful, I can’t be dealing with anything like this,” I thought, so I didn’t read all the comments.
The individual who posted this comment said: “Blondie first for me! Next came the bouncy individual with dark hair. One more said, “Can’t I have both?”
After the comments were completed, Miss Desmond shut off her Twitter account.
I’m accustomed to unpleasant people and trolls, but being pitted against your closest friend is simply incredibly upsetting, she added. Just so humiliating.
The account was reported to Twitter by Miss Desmond and her friends, but they were informed that it had not violated the site’s safety guidelines and would not be removed.
More than 2,000 photographs have been posted on the account. Most of them seem to have been employed without the women’s consent. Some of the females shown seem to be extremely young; in one picture, a girl is seen standing next to balloons celebrating her 18th birthday.
Another depicts five young ladies, and a male says to one of the girls, “Hope they’re not schoolgirls.”
Professor Clare McGlynn, a Durham University specialist on online sexual harassment, said: “It’s the equivalent of being harassed while walking down the street online, but because it’s online it may reach thousands of people.”
The photographs of the girls, who seemed young, were “shocking and distressing, but not unexpected,” she said, adding that Twitter “was not acting properly and rapidly with accusations of abusive behaviour.” When contacted for comment, the account’s owner remained silent.
Twitter acknowledged that “there is still work to be done,” but said that users “may not distribute private material, such as photographs or videos of private persons, without their authorization.”
Twitter terminated the account last night after being contacted by the Daily Mail.