In recent weeks, a trend called #silhouettechallenge has gone viral on TikTok. For a remix of “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” by Paul Anka, the trend participants (most, but not all, women) stand in front of the camera fully dressed and then stand in silhouette with a filter red, dancing provocatively and showing off their bodies.
The trend was intended to be a sexy and positive challenge for the body, but it was hijacked by individuals who used software to remove the red filter from the videos to reveal women’s bodies completely, whether they are dressed, partially dressed or naked. And although a subreddit featuring these edited TikToks has been banned by Reddit, there are still dozens of videos on YouTube instructing people on how to edit the videos. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of views and at least six of them show ads, indicating that they are monetized, by a review shared with Rolling Stone by Media Matters. The most popular of the videos has over 233,000 views and tends to be submitted by reviews of technology products and hack channels.
Apparently, people are searching for the term so often that “how to remove the red light in the silhouette challenge” appears in autocomplete below terms like “how to paint the exterior of the house” and “how to remove squirrels from the attic”.
As the tutorials spread, many creators turned to TikTok to warn women against participating in the challenge or to pay special attention to what they were wearing if they decided to participate. “Be aware of what you are wearing before editing the final product because anyone can take these images and easily revert them to the original,” warned a TikTok user in a video with over 778,000 views.
On social media, some people have adopted the victim’s blame reasoning that if an individual is shown in a video dancing naked or partially dressed – even if he has edited so as not to expose their bodies – they do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy if someone else take the initiative to remove the filter and post the images again (including as part of a YouTube tutorial). But Danielle Citron, a law professor at Boston University School of Law, disagrees. She says that #SilhouetteChallenge participants who have been violated in this way may have legal remedies under the public disclosure of a de facto private offense, which deals with the publication of an individual’s private information that “is not of legitimate interest to the public”.
As the manipulated images are made public on the Internet and are not considered worthy of news, they undoubtedly constitute an invasion of privacy, “in the sense that the person had a reasonable expectation that the photo would show him partially dressed, not undressed”, Citron account Rolling Stone. “We have a reasonable expectation that the photos we post will not be stripped and the images and identities used to undress … when I go out in a short skirt, is that allowed to look at my skirt with a drone?”
On YouTube, the tutorial videos appear to violate the platform’s community guidelines against sexual content, particularly content that portrays “non-consensual sexual acts or unwanted sexualization”. Google, owner of YouTube, did not immediately respond to Rolling Stonerequest for comment from.