On-line social networks are complex ensembles of inter-linked communities that interact on different topics. Some communities are characterized by what are usually referred to as deviant behaviors, conducts that are commonly considered inappropriate with respect to the society's norms or moral standards. Eating disorders, drug use, and adult content consumption are just a few examples. We refer to such communities as deviant networks. It is commonly believed that such deviant networks are niche, isolated social groups, whose activity is well separated from the mainstream social-media life. According to this assumption, research studies have mostly considered them in isolation. In this work we focused on adult content consumption networks, which are present in many on-line social media and in the Web in general. We found that few small and densely connected communities are responsible for most of the content production. Differently from previous work, we studied how such communities interact with the whole social network. We found that the produced content flows to the rest of the network mostly directly or through bridge-communities, reaching at least 450 times more users. We also show that a large fraction of the users can be inadvertently exposed to such content through indirect content resharing. We also discuss a demographic analysis of the producers and consumers networks. Finally, we show that it is easily possible to identify a few core users to radically uproot the diffusion process. We aim at setting the basis to study deviant communities in context.
The Internet has evolved into a huge video delivery infrastructure, with websites such as YouTube and Netflix appearing at the top of most traffic measurement studies. However, most traffic studies have largely kept silent about an area of the Internet that (even today) is poorly understood: adult media distribution. Whereas ten years ago, such services were provided primarily via peer-to-peer file sharing and bespoke websites, recently these have converged towards what is known as Porn 2.0''. These popular web portals allow users to upload, view, rate and comment videos for free. Despite this, we still lack even a basic understanding of how users interact with these services. This paper seeks to address this gap by performing the first large-scale measurement study of one of the most popular Porn 2.0 websites: YouPorn. We have repeatedly crawled the website to collect statistics about 183k videos, witnessing over 60 billion views. Through this, we offer the first characterisation of this type of corpus, highlighting the nature of YouPorn's repository. We also inspect the popularity of objects and how they relate to other features such as the categories to which they belong. We find evidence for a high level of flexibility in the interests of its user base, manifested in the extremely rapid decay of content popularity over time, as well as high susceptibility to browsing order. Using a small-scale user study, we validate some of our findings and explore the infrastructure design and management implications of our observations. This national survey of youth, ages 10 to 17, and their caretakers has several implications for the current debate about young people and Internet pornography. Twenty five percent of youth had unwanted exposure to sexual pictures on the Internet in the past year, challenging the prevalent assumption that the problem is primarily about young people motivated to actively seek out pornography. Most youth had no negative reactions to their unwanted exposure, but one quarter said they were very or extremely upset, suggesting a priority need for more research on and interventions directed toward such negative effects. The use of filtering and blocking software was associated with a modest reduction in unwanted exposure, suggesting that it may help but is far from foolproof. Various forms of parental supervision were not associated with any reduction in exposure. The authors urge that social scientific research be undertaken to inform this highly contentious public policy controversy.   Previous research on exposure to different types of pornography has primarily relied on analyses of millions of search terms and histories or on user exposure patterns within a given time period rather than the self-reported frequency of consumption. Further, previous research has almost exclusively relied on theoretical or ad hoc overarching categorizations of different types of pornography, when investigating patterns of pornography exposure, rather than latent structure analyses of these exposure patterns. In contrast, using a large sample of 18- to 40-year-old heterosexual and nonheterosexual Croatian men and women, this study investigated the self-reported frequency of using 27 different types of pornography and statistically explored their latent structures. The results showed substantial differences in consumption patterns across gender and sexual orientation. However, latent structure analyses of the 27 different types of pornography assessed suggested that although several categories of consumpti... Abstract We examined exposure to Internet pornography before the age of 18, as reported by college students (n = 563), via an online survey. Ninety-three percent of boys and 62 of girls were exposed to online pornography during adolescence. Exposure prior to age 13 was relatively uncommon. Boys were more likely to be exposed at an earlier age, to see more images, to see more extreme images (e.g., rape, child pornography), and to view pornography more often, while girls reported more involuntary exposure. If participants in this study are typical of young people, exposure to pornography on the Internet can be described as a normative experience, and more study of its impact is clearly warranted. The purpose of this study was to analyze pornography exposure in a sample of 702 Italian adolescents (46 males; mean age = 18.2, SD = 0.8). Among male students, 11 were not exposed, 44.5 were exposed to nonviolent material, and 44.5 were exposed to violent degrading material. Among female students, 60.8 were not exposed, 20.4 were exposed to nonviolent material, and 18.8 were exposed to violent degrading material. Among males, adjusted odds ratio (AdjOR) of exposure to violent degrading pornography were higher if using alcohol, having friends who sell buy sex, and taking sexual pictures. Females who were victims of family violence, attending technical vocational schools, and taking sexual pictures had higher AdjOR of watching violent pornography; smoking and having friends who sell buy sex were associated with both nonviolent and violent degrading exposure. Exposure to violent degrading pornography is common among adolescents, associated with at-risk behaviors, and, for females, it correlates with a history of victimization. School nurses have a pivotal role in including discussions about pornography in interventions about relationships, sexuality, or violence. Language: en YouPorn is one of the largest providers of adult content on the web. Being free of charge, the video portal allows users - besides watching - to upload, categorize, and comment on pornographic videos. With this position paper, we point out the challenges of analyzing the textual data offered with the videos. We report on first experiments and problems with our YouPorn dataset , which we extracted from the non-graphical content of the YP website. To gain some insights, we performed association rule mining on the video categories and tags, and investigated preferences of users based on their nickname. Hoping that future research will be able to build upon our initial experiences, we make the ready-to-use YP dataset publicly available. OBJECTIVE.The goal was to assess the extent of unwanted and wanted exposure to online pornography among youth Internet users and associated risk factors. METHODS.A telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 1500 youth Internet users aged 10 to 17 years was conducted between March and June 2005. RESULTS.Forty-two percent of youth Internet users had been exposed to online pornography in the past year. Of those, 66 reported only unwanted exposure. Multinomial logistic regression analysis was used to compare youth with unwanted exposure only or any wanted exposure with those with no exposure. Unwanted exposure was related to only 1 Internet activity, namely, using filesharing programs to download images. Filtering and blocking software reduced the risk of unwanted exposure, as did attending an Internet safety presentation by law enforcement personnel. Unwanted exposure rates were higher for teens, youth who reported being harassed or sexually solicited online or interpersonally victimized offline, and youth who scored in the borderline or clinically significant range on the Child Behavior Checklist subscale for depression. Wanted exposure rates were higher for teens, boys, and youth who used file-sharing programs to download images, talked online to unknown persons about sex, used the Internet at friends’ homes, or scored in the borderline or clinically significant range on the Child Behavior Checklist subscale for rule-breaking. Depression also could be a risk factor for some youth. Youth who used filtering and blocking software had lower odds of wanted exposure. CONCLUSIONS.More research concerning the potential impact of Internet pornography on youth is warranted, given the high rate of exposure, the fact that much exposure is unwanted, and the fact that youth with certain vulnerabilities, such as depression, interpersonal victimization, and delinquent tendencies, have more exposure.