Ivana Bacik warned that social media images were being used for “sinister and disturbing” purposes

Portfolios of young Irish women are being created and disseminated through online file-sharing websites by users who collaborate to amass photograph collections and detailed personal information, an analysis has found.

Anonymous users of 4chan, an image board site, and Volafile, a file-sharing platform with a live chat function, have been sharing hundreds of photos of young Irish women in recent weeks.

The photos were collected from several sources including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Snapchat by users working together. In one case a user bragged of stealing them from a young woman’s personal phone gallery.

While sharing photos of women without their consent or knowledge has been observed previously in isolated threads, the discussions uncovered by The Times and Storyful, the social media intelligence company, showed