Justin Patchin

So technically, by the letter of the law, there could be some significant legal implications for that.

Thankfully, I think we're getting a little bit better at handling those situations more informally, but the reality is there could be some pretty serious consequences.

Well, we explored a couple angles of that in our most recent research.

And so among the 25% or so who had sent an image to somebody else, nearly half said that image was shared with a third party without their knowledge.

That's a concern, right?

Nearly half.

And about a half had experienced sextortion, meaning somebody threatened them for harm, usually threatening to share the images with family and friends or posting them online.

If they didn't acquiesce to some demand, oftentimes you need to send me more images or you need to send me money, gift cards, cash app.

And so at least with respect to those two potential harms, the risk is basically 50-50.

We very much did, and I'm the one who analyzes the data, and I looked at it and just triple-checked to make sure we didn't put the decimal in the wrong place.

And then we tried to just brainstorm if we might have been missing something.

Like, are there instances, for example, where boyfriend-girlfriend are maybe playfully saying, well, if you don't send me more images, I'm going to do this, that, or the other thing, and that were being interpreted by the young people we surveyed as sextortion.

But

The problem is there hasn't been a lot of research on sextortion and non-consensual sharing of these images, particularly among minors.

And so we need more research to do, to be conducted to kind of corroborate what we found.

But it was super concerning.

You're right.

Yeah, so my co-researcher Samir Hinduja and I wrote a paper five, six years ago with a pretty bold statement slash title.

And basically the argument was it's time to teach safe sexting.

And we had thought about this for years and we didn't really want to ruin our careers at that point to try to argue such a thing.