Emma Watson leaked photo threat actually viral hoax campaign
Leaked celebrity photo scandals have been a hot topic over the last month or so, as many high profile celebs have had private photos stolen from them and posted onto the Internet.
And whilst many scammers have been taking advantage of the leaks by luring victims into traps with the prospect of nude photographs, one PR company has pulled off one epic viral hoax by claiming to have leaked photos of actress Emma Watson.
Watson has been in the spotlight recently, after a speech on gender equality at the UN which was highly praised. However in the run up to the speech, an anonymous poster on 4Chan.org threatened the actress with the prospect of leaking nude photographs of her.
This was the beginning of the hoax. 4Chan.org was the forum where many of the leaked celebrity photos were originally posted, and many assumed this poster may have been the same hacker.
Soon after this a website appeared – EmmaYouAreNext.com – with a countdown and picture of Emma’s face next to the 4Chan.org logo. Tweets, forum posts, Facebook messages and other activity heated up, all linking to this mysterious website. The question being – what would happen when the countdown hit zero? The Internet was buzzing, and this website was at the center of it all.
The “big reveal” was finally scheduled for September 24th, Midnight EST, and at the exact moment the website began redirecting to another website. Only instead of leaked photos of Emma Watson, viewers were presented with the webpage belonging to Rantic Media, a PR company, who according to them, have been hired by celebrity publicists to “bring this disgusting issue to attention” (the issue of naked photos being leaked across the Internet, that is.)
Rantic Marketing appears to be a very new company, if they even are a company at all! Their Twitter feed only shows 10 Tweets, all recent, and their domain rantic.com was registered this year, with little feedback about them online. It is possible they are owned by social media manipulators FoxWeekly (not Fox news) who are hosted on the same web server.
The Rantic website also claimed the Internet needed to be censored and that website 4Chan.org should be shut down.
A controversial message indeed.
Regardless of how their message is received, it appears this entire debacle hasn’t done their online presence any harm, something a “PR company” would no doubt be pleased with – according to some of their statistics they themselves published, the EmmaYouAreNext website attracted 48 million hits and over 3 million Twitter mentions – and we imagine plenty of that attention is currently getting transferred to Rantic right now.
Whilst many worked out before the “reveal” that this was likely just a marketing ploy, it is obviously one that worked, and worked well.
There is some ingenuity left in cyberspace, it would seem.
Did you hear about the hoax? Did you know it was just a marketing ploy? Let us know in the comments below.
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