“Ukraine’s intelligence service says it thwarted a Russian plot to blackmail a local teenage girl into blowing up a police building by threatening to make public intimate pictures on her phone.”
“Ukraine’s intelligence service says it thwarted a Russian plot to blackmail a local teenage girl into blowing up a police building by threatening to make public intimate pictures on her phone.”
People already say the same about Photoshop and people already don’t believe them.
The person making claims is the one that needs to provide the evidence. Anyone spreading unverified rumors should be viewed like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
In order for a rumor or something like naked pictures to be effective in its purpose of bringing you down or blackmailing you it must cause emotional distress. If you don’t take it seriously–or even better, don’t give a shit about what random strangers say–it can’t have power over you.
We don’t live in tiny, closely-tied villages anymore. A rumor about you may be on the Internet forever but it’ll be about as believable as a “hot singles in your area” ad and the likelihood of someone even finding it goes down over time as it gets drowned out by all the other bullshit that exists.
Even celebrities that are famous for doing stupid shit are finding that nobody remembers their past failings anymore. And they’ll have hundreds to thousands of real news articles about their idiocy out there, ready for anyone to read.