Culture

EmmaYouAreNext.com Wasn’t A 4Chan Threat; It Was A Viral Campaign For A Marketing Company

Everything is the worst.

by Steph Harmon  24 September 2014

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Hours after Emma Watson gave a stirring speech about gender equality to the UN on Monday morning, a website appeared that sent the internet into Outrage Mode.

EmmaYouAreNext.com led to a clock counting down the seconds until 3pm today, AEST — warning “never forget, the biggest to come thus far”.

Blazoned as it was with the 4chan logo, it didn’t take long for all websites everywhere to connect the threat to the recent celebrity nude photo leak; the photos that surfaced earlier this month had come from 4chan, where a link to EmmaYouAreNext.com had been posted early this week.

‘Hackers threaten to publish nude Emma Watson photos after UN feminism speech‘ wrote Fairfax. ‘Emma Watson Asked Men to Support Women And Here’s How They Responded‘ wrote Time. ‘Feminists rally round Emma Watson after 4chan nude pictures threats‘ wrote the Guardian. The BBC, Washington Post, and NBC, the Telegraph and the Independent all churned out stories too.

But overnight, 4chan publically disowned the website; and early this morning, Reddit user BetterKorea pointed out that the website was hosted on the same server as Rantic.com, a PR company connected to Foxweekly.com — the first website to post about EmmaYouAreNext.com. “Respected Media like BBC, Washington Post, The Guardian didn’t give a shit investigating before writing their articles,” the user wrote. “Just by using Google and Wikipedia this could have been prevented.”

Sure enough, at 3pm this afternoon, the landing page — emmayouarenext.com — was redirecting to rantic.com:

shutdown

“Join us as we shutdown 4chan and prevent more private pictures from being leaked,” reads a message on the site. “None of these women deserve this and together we can make a change.”

At a glance, it seems like a good idea, right? An awareness campaign to stop a terrible website from doing terrible things! But scroll a little deeper and the over-riding message of the site is less about exposing a culture of misogyny that pervades 4chan, and more about Rantic themselves, and how clever their hoax was.

“EmmaYouAreNext.com has reached over 48 Million Visitors, 7 Million Facebook Shares/Likes & 3 Million Twitter Mentions Worldwide,” they boast, in a mixture of sentence and title case that’s sure to boggle the mind. “Rantic is a social media marketing enterprise that has participated in some of the most viral campaigns and music videos,” they explain.

And then there is the open letter they encourage you to send to… The White House? Really?

Dear Barack Obama,

We have been hired by celebrity publicists to bring this disgusting issue to attention. 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

Sincerely,

Rantic.com

Look. I don’t want to completely rag on Rantic: maybe you can publicise your company AND do something good at the same time? But if they are a real PR firm and not just deep trolling masterminds, you gotta hope they were in touch with Emma Watson first.

Either way, they’re about to get pretty fucked up.