[Inside the Newsroom] The tip that led us inside a non-consensual porn forum

Since the investigation on NSFWPH came out, more people have started sending us their own cases The investigation into NSFWPH began when student journalist Lance Bustos approached the author, leading to months of tracking online behavior and community dynamics within the forum. The investigation highlighted the challenges of jurisdiction in internet investigations, as harmful sites may operate outside the Philippines, complicating accountability for local authorities. The most significant aspect of the investigation was connecting with victims of the site, emphasizing the importance of understanding their experiences and shifting the blame from victims to those who violate trust. This is AI-generated. Read the article for full context. Report any errors. Earlier this year, student journalist Lance Bustos approached me at an event and told me about NSFWPH. That was how this investigation began. It sounds simple, but a lot of investigative work starts exactly that way: someone knows something, sees something, or has been watching something for a while, and decides to tell a journalist. Lance, who would later become a Rappler fellow, had already been looking into NSFWPH for months. He wasn’t just browsing the site. He had been doing OSINT, or open-source intelligence — collecting publicly available information online, making sense of it, and connecting the dots. You may have heard the term during the Sara Duterte impeachment trial when the National Bureau of Investigation began investigating the Vice President’s threats against President Bongbong Marcos. In practice, it can be as basic as following usernames, social media posts, links, timestamps, website records, online videos, and other digital crumbs until a pattern begins to emerge. It has become an effective tool for journalists. In my case, aside from NSFWPH, during the last presidential election campaign, we investigated DDoS attacks against us and other news sites. We followed the digital trail until it led us to one of the people behind the attacks. With NSFWPH, Lance had already started doing the same thing. When I began working with him, we kept going. For months, we tracked behavior inside the forum. We documented not just what people posted, but how the community worked, and how members communicated with one another. What earned attention? What behavior was rewarded? What did users brag about? What did they consider normal? We felt that truly understanding this was important because online communities can shape behavior. You may remember 8chan, the forum that became notorious after users linked to several mass shootings posted extremist material there before being shut down in 2019. Obviously, NSFWPH is a different case. But the broader point is the same: what gets normalized online can spill into the real world. And as we’ve written, we found examples of real-world harm, including students who appeared to have been targeted. After the Tacloban and Zamboanga shootings, whose shooters allegedly had been influenced by malign online forces operating within an amorphous NVE (nihilistic violent extremism) network, it’s only become more important to pierce through these online spaces. We also looked at how NSFWPH was set up. Using publicly available tools, we found that it was routed through Cloudflare, which made it more difficult to identify the site’s operator. That led us to another recurring problem in internet investigations: jurisdiction. A site may target Filipinos and harm Filipinos, but the companies, servers, or operators behind it may be outside the Philippines. Local authorities can quickly hit a wall. We see versions of this problem with other platforms too, whether the issue involves Roblox, Meta, or other global services. It is one reason authorities have pushed for foreign platforms to have a local legal entity that can be held accountable without having to rely immediately on international cooperation that may take time. New bills in recent months are legislating for exactly this: official local entities for international platforms that can be quickly held accountable. And yet the most important part of this investigation was not technical. It goes back to the victims themselves, the people most affected. We wanted to find a person who had actually been victimized on the site and was willing to talk. I eventually came across one who had already shared her experience online and had directly mentioned NSFWPH. I talked to her, and she articulated her experience bravely and well. She said the shame belonged to the people who spread the material, not to the person who trusted a partner after being promised that those photos or videos would stay private. Too often, when intimate material leaks, people ask the victim: Why did you send it? Why did you allow yourself to be recorded? The better question is: Why did someone violate that trust? Since the investigation came out, more people have started sending us their own cases. We are going through them now and looking at where our reporting can help. One person came forward with a tip. That tip became months of monitoring and documenting, leading to our final report. The reporting reached victims. And now some of them are coming forward too. It’s a reminder that sometimes that is how an investigation grows, with one person deciding to speak. Email us at desk@rappler.com. – Rappler.com Inside the Newsroom is a newsletter delivered straight to your inbox every week. 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