As she reeled from the discovery of a pornographic website featuring AI-generated images of herself naked, the prominent Italian journalist and writer Francesca Barra said the question that struck her the most came from her young daughter.
“She asked me: ‘how do you feel?’,” Barra, 47, said. “But what I heard was another more subtle question that my pre-adolescent daughter perhaps didn’t have the courage to ask, and that was: ‘If it happened to me, how would I handle it?’.”
Social Media Girls, which has more than 7 million worldwide subscribers and includes a section dedicated to “Italian nude VIPs”, is the latest in a series of sexist online forums to have surfaced in Italy’s public domain in recent months.
It follows Mia Moglie (My Wife), a now-shuttered Facebook group where men exchanged intimate photos of their wives, and a website called Phica, a misspelt play on a slang word for vagina in Italian, where doctored images accompanied by obscene comments of dozens of high-profile women, including the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, were published. Phica has since been removed by Italian prosecutors and the man who operated the site is under investigation, while Social Media Girls is being investigated amid calls to close it down.
In a reaction reminiscent of #MeToo, dozens of journalists, actors, influencers and female politicians targeted on the sites have spoken out against what has been collectively described as “virtual rape”.
Italy has long grappled with profound misogyny but the rapid spread of sexist forums, especially those using AI, is presenting an additional and hugely complex challenge.
Barra, who hosts a political TV show on the Rete 4 channel was the first well-known Italian woman to publicly denounce and submit a legal complaint against Social Media Girls, which has been active for 11 years and featured “nudified” images of several personalities, including the actor Sophia Loren.
The mother of four was informed her image was on the site by a man who visited it.
“When I first saw it, I felt violated and mortified,” Barra said. “Then I became angry and told myself: ‘I will not allow anyone to violate me twice’. Possibly the only consolation is that it was pointed out by a man, who obviously frequents porn sites but who seemed to understand that this is not just a game of sexual perversion between men, but a real crime against the inviolable principle of consent.”
Barra said it was her duty to speak out on behalf of the women who do not share the same level of public prominence or who are too afraid to come forward because they fear being judged.
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