'Violated' The women taking on porn sites over photos

As she reeled from the discovery of a pornographic website featuring AI-generated images of herself naked, the prominent Italian journalist and writer Francesca Barra said the question that struck her the most came from her young daughter.

- Angela Giuffrida ROME

"She asked me: 'How do you feel?'" Barra, 47, said. "But what I heard was another more subtle question that my preadolescent daughter perhaps didn't have the courage to ask, and that was: 'If it happened to me, how would I handle it?'"

Social Media Girls, which has more than 7 million worldwide subscribers and includes a section dedicated to "Italian nude VIPs", is the latest in a series of sexist online forums to have surfaced in Italy's public domain in recent months.

It follows Mia Moglie (My Wife), a now-closed down Facebook group where men exchanged intimate photos of their wives, and a website called Phica, a misspelt play on a slang word for vagina in Italian, where doctored images accompanied by obscene comments of dozens of high-profile women, including the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, were published. Phica has since been removed by Italian prosecutors and the man who operated the site is under investigation, while Social Media Girls is being investigated amid calls to close it down.

In a reaction reminiscent of #MeToo, dozens of journalists, actors, influencers and female politicians who were targeted on the sites have spoken out against what has been collectively described as "virtual rape".