Over the past few hours, Twitter has been burning up with comments about the Amber Cole video. Without going into too much detail, Cole is a 14-year-old girl who is allegedly shown in a video doing something most people like to think 14-year-old girls don’t do with their boyfriends.
See also: When did it become okay to bully a girl via Twitter?
The video is doing the rounds online despite the rather important fact that it allegedly amounts to child porn. Posting the video or sharing it, or perhaps even linking to it, might count as spreading child porn. And no matter your opinion of the contents of the video, that doesn’t give you the right to share it around or to condemn people who are featured in the video. Personally, I don’t want to see it at all.
We’d probably all like to live in a world where 14-year-old girls don’t do things like this. We don’t, though, and for that reason we have to be careful about how such matters are treated. The most important thing is to think about the wellbeing of the girl in the video, and having her as a trending topic on Twitter – and subjecting her to ridicule – doesn’t really count as looking out for her. If you see the Amber Cole video, should your first reaction really be to hit ‘share’?
