Iowa State Navy Facebook Photo Scandal Exposed As Explicit Pictures Posted Online
A photo scandal involving pictures posted to Facebook of Navy cadets enrolled at Iowa State University consisted of "willing participants," a ranking official for the Navy said Friday. While details were scarce, the people who took and posted the photos were made up of seven men, the Associated Press reported. The photos were posted around the Ames campus as well as on social media.
It was unclear who the pictures were of and what exactly they showed that made them apparently so inappropriate, but the Navy indicated on Friday that it was taking steps to address the situation that was first brought to light after other cadets reported seeing the photos to their superiors on March 4. The Facebook page where the pictures were posted to was called Glorious Order of the Sextant and described as being "dedicated to the preservation of those nautical, professional, and social traditions of the Iowa State Naval ROTC that are worth preserving," according to the Iowa State Daily.
Read: Another Marine Photo Scandal Victim Speaks Out
"We take this issue very seriously and categorically do not condone this behavior — it has no place in our military or society, and it does not comport with our core values," Naval Service Training Command spokesman Lt. Sean Brophy said.
The news from the Iowa State Navy cadets followed a similar photo scandal in the Marines, where several Corps members were being investigated over leaked naked photos of their female colleagues posted online. The investigation prompted the U.S. Air Force to update its policy on social media. Part of the revised social media guidelines forbade posting "any defamatory, libelous, vulgar, obscene, abusive, profane, threatening, hateful, racially, ethnically, or otherwise offensive or illegal information or material."
The Marines also revised its own social media regulations for enlistees that detailed "how Marines will be held accountable for their online activities."
Multiple Marine photo scandal victims have spoken out about their experiences being unwillingly involved in the posting of their images to the internet.
"I felt like my privacy had been taken away from me," Kally Wayne, who admitted posing for pictures but never intended for them to be made public, told ABC News in March. "Having to go through being harassed for every day of my life for the past year because of a mistake I made four years ago is not anything anyone deserves to go through."
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