Threat to post Emma Watson nude photos appears to be hoax

It was seen, at first, as a backlash. When online threats emerged at the weekend to release naked photographs of the actor Emma Watson, many felt it was a hostile response to a barnstorming speech the Harry Potter star had just given to the UN about women’s rights.

But in a series of bizarre twists, a website claiming to belong to an online marketing company said on Wednesday that it had made up the threat as a publicity stunt to shut down the notorious messageboard 4chan – only for further claims to emerge that the entire episode was the work of hoaxers. In fact, neither the marketing company – nor the naked photographs – appear to exist.

What now appears to be a tasteless online spoof first emerged on Saturday, when a website entitled EmmaYouAreNext.com appeared featuring an image of the actor next to a countdown.

It appeared to refer to a mass hacking in August of naked celebrity photographs from their Apple iCloud accounts (which Watson had condemned on Twitter) and featured the message: “Never Forget, The Biggest To Come Thus Far”, along with the logo of 4chan. Users of the anarchic image-based messageboard have been blamed for coordinating numerous internet hoaxes and attacks.

There was initial scepticism in some quarters, with some questioning why, if photographs of Watson existed at all, they had not been released alongside images of Jennifer Lawrence, Rihanna and others as part of the iCloud hack.

On Wednesday it seemed that the doubters had been right, when the countdown was removed from the EmmaYouAreNext.com website, to be replaced by the logo “Shut down 4Chan”, and a letter to Barack Obama calling for the messageboard to be closed down.

The letter to Obama claims the website was the work of Rantic.com, a “social media marketing enterprise”. “Dear Barack Obama, We have been hired by celebrity publicists to bring this disgusting issue to attention,” it reads. “The recent 4chan celebrity nude leaks in the past 2 months have been an invasion of privacy and is also clear indication that the internet NEEDS to be censored. Every Facebook like, share & Twitter mention will count as a social signature -- and will be one step closer to shutting down www.4chan.org.”

The website claims that Emmayouarenext.com had received 48 million visitors, 7m Facebook shares and likes and 3m Twitter mentions. Rantic.com named its founder/CEO as “Brad Cockingham”. “4chan is messing with the wrong one, ladies have been suffering, Kids are being exposed to the utterly disturbing content, 4chan IS KILL,” it said in a number of Twitter posts on Wednesday.

But despite the site’s claim to be defending the honour of suffering “ladies”, the website Business Insider claims that Rantic.com itself does not exist, and is instead the work of a group of internet hoaxers called SocialVevo, whose motive is to capitalise on internet trends to gain page views.

Attempts to contact Rantic.com online are met by an error message. A spokesman for Emma Watson said she would not be making any comment on the episode. (The Guardian)