The correct term would be non-consensual dissemination of intimate material. Photos and videos taken for themselves or for the partner of the moment, sent with the belief that you can trust the person who receives them and then uploaded, instead, to third party sites, forums, channels followed by thousands of people. The incorrect term, but more immediate and now in the common imagination, is revenge porn. And it was invented by Hunter Moore, “the most hated man on the Internet”.
Born in Sacramento, California in 1986, Moore is the founder of Is Anyone Up?infamous site that between 2010 and 2012 has sharedprecisely, thousands of sexual content without consent of the people depicted. What differentiates Is Anyone Up? from the endless number of sites that contain amateur porn online it was a particularly cruel feature: the identity of the person was almost always linked to intimate photos and videos – their name, links to their Facebook, Instagram and Twitter profiles, sometimes even their contacts. In the comments section, as is often the case, hundreds if not thousands of people then spent their time insulting the people in the photos and wishing them the worst.
To make Moore deserve the nickname “the most hated man on the Internet” – as defined by a profile published on Rolling Stone in 2012 – it is however the total and open disdain that man has repeatedly shown towards people whose life has been made hell by his site.
Social
Two million Italians have been victims of Revenge porn. 14 million viewed the images
The site was born almost by accident, as Moore was looking for a way to share photos of a girlfriend he was sleeping with with his friends. After posting them on a domain that he had bought some time ago to promote a party, he realized that it would be fun to let his friends post them the intimate photos of others they had on their computer: within a few weeks, Is Anyone Up? was on everyone’s lips within the Californian alternative scene. In a couple of years, he would receive hundreds of non-consensual intimate content a day from around the world.
Justifying, as he did from the first moment, his work, Moore said that if he began to remove “revenge porn” his entire business model he would have collapsed: he was just through the humiliation and destruction of people’s reputations that he came to do between 8 and 13 thousand dollars per month. Defending himself on television, he said that his work “did not seem shabby at all” and that “he did not understand how the girls could point the finger at him: they are the ones who took the picture”.
I study
Lights on at night, heating off in winter: connected houses become instruments of domestic violence
by Andrea Daniele Signorelli
Stopping him seemed impossible: the boy was known for completely ignore the appeals of people asking him to remove their images from the site. In some cases, if he replied, he only did it to write a sardonic LOL. In the worst cases, he went so far as to manipulate the girls, offering to remove their photos only in exchange for performance.
A woman, Charlotte Laws, broke his empirewho managed to find that Moore had hired a hacker to steal intimate images directly from computers of many girls after a photo of their daughter Kayla ended up on the site. Helped by Anonymous and then by the FBIthis initially private investigation leads to the arrest of Moore and hacker Charles Evans on January 23, 2014, after Is Anyone Up? it had already been sold to an anti-bullying activist. Moore, who faced seven years in prison, only got two and a half years in the end, but once he got out of prison he kept a much lower profilestopping posting stuff on Twitter and Instagram and writing a memoirIs Anyone Up?: The Story of Revenge Porn.
Now, this story is told on Netflix in the docu-series entitled, precisely, The most hated man on the Internet.
Moore’s is, basically, a story of trolling. Someone, during the docuseries, defines him “the first troll in history”: a record that the Californian certainly cannot boast, considering that the practice of harassing one’s neighbor online with increasingly offensive comments was already very much in vogue online in the early nineties , but which helps to focus on how many of his actions can be interpreted within a subculture that worshiped – and partly still worships – extremely provocative characters at the expense of the real, tangible damage they cause to people.
Moore had initially agreed to be interviewed for the documentary, but later pulled back: thus, his point of view in the series is revealed through tweets published between 2010 and 2012, videos and podcasts in which he often repeats not to repent at all of their actions, some interviews with journalists. The picture that emerges is that of a one-dimensional sociopath, a bad made on purpose for tv. But, on the other hand, the same Moore interviewed by Rolling Stone he had claimed to feel like he was playing the character of “a fucking jerk”.
The annual report
The digital humanism of the Privacy Guarantor: beware of the Social War
by Arturo Di Corinto
Whether or not he is a sociopath – a diagnosis better suited to a psychiatrist than a documentary for just under three hours – one thing is certain: while the girls who ended up on his site attempted suicide, they lost their jobs or custody of their parents. children because of the images published in Is Anyone Up ?, he told reporters to sleep peacefully. “For someone with no education, the Internet can provide a viable career alternative if you know how to read and manipulate his trends,” reported Alex Morris after spending some time with Moore. “This involves giving people what they want and, according to Moore, what people want is hurting each other, taking revenge on the people who hurt them and seeing other people bullshit.”