She became a prominent advocate for mental health following a battle with depression and several suicide attempts, co-founding the suicide prevention group Voices of Hope in 2016.<\/p>\n
Her content is intended to help people who are struggling with self-harm and depression, and, as a survivor of sexual abuse, she is disturbed it is instead being pushed out to porn-addicted men.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo know they are using videos of me to advertise a porn addiction service, without my knowledge or consent, is horrific,\u201d Thornton said.<\/p>\n
Thornton said it was \u201cinsane\u201d that a paid internet service was \u201cusing a young female, who has been a victim of sexual violence at the hands of men\u201d.<\/p>\n
Branding itself as a free, faith-based app helping men \u201covercome lust and reclaim their faith\u201d through Christian strategies, Unchaind was first launched in February this year.<\/p>\n
Searches on Meta\u2019s ad library show the app is not running its targeted ads in New Zealand, a choice Thornton suspects is quite \u201cpurposeful\u201d.<\/p>\n
Her research has led her to believe the developers are actually based in France, despite listing the app\u2019s headquarters as an address in Massachusetts.<\/p>\n
If this is true, Thornton said she will have to retain a French lawyer to take any legal action about the use of her content.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would love to see New Zealand step up their game in protecting their people, especially if they are stuck in this spot I am in on being hand-tied by a different country.\u201d<\/p>\n
With seemingly limited avenues left to intervene, she has asked users who come across the ads to report them and report the app.<\/p>\n
The creators of Unchaind have been approached for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She became a prominent advocate for mental health following a battle with depression and several suicide attempts, co-founding…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113601,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1117,19053,74,2724,8996,43714,81002,134,33340,194,1073,1885,111,139,69,1118,54161,81003,17944,1560,2552,1072,213,1458,60318,21419,3055,16742,3382,8538,1339],"class_list":["post-113600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-accused","tag-activist","tag-after","tag-app","tag-consent","tag-discovering","tag-faithbased","tag-health","tag-jazz","tag-kiwi","tag-media","tag-mental","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-pornography","tag-pornrecovery","tag-quitting","tag-report","tag-service","tag-social","tag-sports","tag-targeted","tag-thornton","tag-towards","tag-urging","tag-users","tag-using","tag-videos","tag-without"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}