  Late one evening in June, 30-year-old Anita was perusing Reddit to unwind after a day spent on Twitch, the livestreaming platform popular among gamers. While searching for a clip from one of her recent streams, she stumbled upon a subreddit claiming to host “NSFW” photos of her. She was baffled: She had never streamed nude.
As a star on Twitch, where she has 1.7 million followers, much of Anita’s life is spent broadcasting her every move — playing video games and chatting with her viewers for hours on end under the screen name Sweet Anita. She immediately clicked the Reddit page and was horrified to find thousands of men openly exchanging pictures, collages and slowed-down videos of her while boasting about how often they masturbated to them, and discussing in crude detail what they’d like to do to her body.
“No matter what I do or how I dress, they do this to me,” said Anita, who keeps her full name private out of fear for her safety. “I haven’t ever even taken my clothes off in front of the camera and yet I’m still a very successful porn star.”
Compilations of content pulled from Anita’s livestreams at inopportune moments have spread from Twitch and Reddit to major pornography websites, where they’ve racked up hundreds of thousands of views in spite of her repeated pleas for them to be removed. Similar NSFW-themed subreddits and encrypted messaging channels exist for just about every female Twitch personality with even a moderate following, including teenage girls who produce streams that are in no way sexual.
There’s no social media platform where women are safe from sexual harassment. Mobs of misogynist trolls have chased countless women and girls off of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and lesser known sites. But when it comes to streaming on Twitch, women are exceptionally vulnerable to this kind of abuse, which has become normalized as an intrinsic part of their experience both on- and off-platform, regardless of the nature of their content.
The payment app Venmo will no longer feature its global social feed, which had allowed users to see payments between people they don’t know. Previously, users could see publicly shared payments between strangers. In May, an explosive report by BuzzFeed News demonstrated just how easy it was to track down information from Venmo users, including President Joe Biden. Tom Barrack, a longtime friend of former President Donald Trump and the chair of Trump’s inaugural committee, secretly worked for the government of the United Arab Emirates for more than a year as he helped shape Trump’s campaign and presidency, according to a Justice Department indictment released on Tuesday. Prosecutors say Barrack and two partners ― a U.S. employee named Matthew Grimes and an Emirati liaison named Rashid Alshahhi ― illegally interfered in U.S. politics on behalf of a foreign power and then tried to hide the crime. Federal agents have arrested Barrack and Grimes; Alshahhi is at large.
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