The Sociotechnical Stack: Opportunities for Social Computing Research in Non-Consensual Intimate Media

Non-consensual intimate media (NCIM) involves sharing intimate content without the depicted person’s consent, including revenge porn and sexually explicit deepfakes. While NCIM has received attention in legal, psychological, and communication fields over the past decade, it is not sufficiently addressed in computing scholarship. This paper addresses this gap by linking NCIM harms to the specific technological components that facilitate them. We introduce the sociotechnical stack, a conceptual framework designed to map the technical stack to its corresponding social impacts. The sociotechnical stack allows us to analyze sociotechnical problems like NCIM, and points toward opportunities for computing research. We propose a research roadmap for computing and social computing communities to deter NCIM perpetration and support victim-survivors1 through building and rebuilding technologies. © 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).