So it’s official: the Emma You Are Next web site, which was threatening to release nude pictures of Harry Potter actress Emma Watson, is a hoax. The site now redirects traffic to the home page of something called Rantic, a mysterious supposed “social media marketing enterprise” with a reputation for hoaxes.
Rantic is now claiming that the real agenda behind its website was a noble one: to expose the evils of leaked celebrity nudes – and, by painting 4channers as the evil hackers behind it all, to get 4chan itself taken down.
And somehow, to do this, they had to threaten to release nude pics of Emma Watson? It’s like fighting death threats against women – by sending death threats to women. The idea that this is a feminist “false flag” — an idea already being floated in Men’s Rightsy circles — is plainly ridiculous. Rantic’s actions are about as unfeminist as its possible to get.
Indeed, it seems pretty clear that Rantic’s new site is as much of a hoax as its last one.
Rantic’s own, er, “explanation” for the Emma Watson site is a masterpiece of concentrated bullshit:
We have been hired by celebrity publicists to bring this disgusting issue to attention. The recent 4chan celebrity nude leaks in 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 step closer to shutting down www.4chan.org.
Nothing about this makes any sense whatsoever. How do you protect celebrities from threats by threatening a celebrity? How do you use the Emma You Are Next hoax to get 4chan taken down … when everyone now knows that you, not anyone on 4chan, was behind the hoax?
Add to this a call for censorship that seems calculated to enrage the internet masses, and it’s hard not to conclude that Rantic is still playing the internet like a fiddle. For what aim I don’t know. Maybe, like some Men’s Rightsers we could mention, they figure that bad publicity – scratch that, catastrophic publicity – is better than none.
That’s more or less what Business Insider has concluded. In a piece published this morning, BI’s James Cook writes
Rantic Marketing doesn’t exist. This wasn’t a marketing stunt at all, but a social experiment run by the most notorious gang of pranksters on the internet. …
Rantic Marketing is a fake company run by a gang of prolific internet spammers used to quickly capitalize on internet trends for page views. The group go by a variety of different names. Collectively, they’re known as SocialVEVO … The only known video footage of the group is a rap song about pickles that they used dubious spam techniques to make incredibly popular. The song used to have over 8 million views on YouTube.
As for that supposed plan to shut down 4chan? It’s only served to rally 4chan’s defenders.
In any case, the best way to fight celebrity leaks isn’t to shutter 4chan. It’s to find and prosecute those who’ve hacked celebrity nudes (including photos of several young women who were underage when the photos were taken) – and those who’ve knowingly spread them around the internet.
It may be hard to find the original hackers, but it’s certainly not hard to find those who distributed the nudes. Hint: Look at Reddit. Hundreds of thousands of Redditors were involved in what became known as TheFappening, and Reddit itself apparently profited handsomely from the attention and traffic.
Though the original TheFappening subreddit was belatedly shut down, leaked celebrity nudes are still being distributed openly on Reddit. This is criminal activity. Enforce the laws.
And Rantic, whatever your game is — just. fucking. stop.
@ ralmcg – read that essay. That was some hyperbolic word salad. If there was an overarching point to it (besides men are strong, and men and women have different roles in the family) I failed to comprehend it. Even those two conclusions don’t make a Helluva lotta sense.
That’s great, but where’s the mocking?
The essay you linked uses the preferred noun “women”. HTH.
@ralmcg
Your point being … ??? Help me out here.
“Females”? Somehow you’re not pinging my good-will-dar.
@grumpyoldnurse:
That’s because they weren’t conclusions, they were assertions. My best interpretation is that the author thinks “Men’s Rights” (as opposed to general human rights) arise from the difference in family roles, and that divorce court ignores those differences and therefore oppresses men, which caused the MRM to exist.
Which is really weird, because the author then goes on to state that feminism has caused women to have more rights (rather than “different” rights), and that the ideal situation would be to have the law gender neutral, with gender not having any effect on the outcome of a dispute.
What those roles are, or what those rights could be, are not stated.
The whole “men == strength” thing is kinda tacked on to the end. No idea how it connects to anything else, except that apparently it is men’s job to fight for everybody’s rights, but they haven’t been because “it was too comfortable and easy to just kick back and watch football or play Halo or whatever.”
So, in summary, Men and women have different rights due to their gender because they fill different roles in a family, despite gay people existing. Divorce court ignores these differences, which oppresses men, but the ideal law would be gender neuteral. And men need to fight for everyone’s rights despite being the most oppressed ones. Also, Halo is misandry I guess.
Yep, legit just like the #endfathersday and #notyourshield tags.
I guess this series of false flagging is a really lame way to admit they know they don’t have any arguments.
“I despise the idea of it, but the Internet needs to be regulated. It’s unfortunate, but we have no choice anymore.”
Elektra, onsidering many of the calls for the internet to be regulated in some fashion tend to come from major business interests or groups aligned with them and that anonymity/psuedonymity is a HUGE benefit for people who live in countries with a repressive government, I’d have to disagree with that statement. The internet isn’t the issue, though there are certain aspects of it that make certain behaviors more prevalent than in real life (see also: GIFT), the issue is people. Even if they won’t admit to it in person, those attitudes are still there when those jerks aren’t on a computer. Even if at times it seems like the douchesnozzles of the world are just too much, combatting those attitudes seems more effective to me in the long run. It’s a matter of endurance, if you give up, that falls into what they want. As much bluster as they can say about never forgetting and never forgetting, they’re still human and are still capable of either caving or realizing their errors.
@ kirbywarp – that’s what I figured. ::burp:: Pardon me, I think the word salad is giving me indigestion.
Newt, I used females because (1)the word includes both girls and women and (2) the word is used since the word male was used in describing what he said was “male principle”. I know that “women” is the preferred word, but I wanted to include girls in the discussion.
As for mocking the essay, I’ll try. Sure a non-judicial way should be used to help resolve a family crisis but what if it can’t or won’t solve it. Does he think that a little birdie will come down and magically make the situation better? Sometimes, as in spousal and child-abuse cases, the judicial system is the best way to resolve the problem.
Is the phrase “girls and women” too long for some reason? Are bits and bytes very expensive for you?
I despise the idea of it, but the Internet needs to be regulated. It’s unfortunate, but we have no choice anymore.
Isn’t this kind of bs already against the law? We don’t need new laws, we need to enforce the ones that are already there.
At first glance, I thought Rantic would be something to do with Ann Rand.
I absolutely LOVE that story about vagina cookies. I really wish the trolls produced pictures, because I’m 100% certain that the drawings on the cookies would be of labias and not vaginas given “the vaginas of all type” comment.
I don’t know very many feminists that say “vagina” when they mean “labia”, but I know a lot of men that do. Maybe trolls should start listening to feminists so they don’t sound like fools when they start talking about what one’s vagina looks like since most people don’t own speculums.
Couldn’t the kids with severe allergies just not eat the homemade treats? Why deprive everyone else? This just sounds to me like schools trying to control every aspect of kid’s lives. Like increasingly strict dress codes. In the 80’s and 90’s when I was in school the only things we weren’t allowed to wear were hats (because panic over gangs was in back then) or any clothing items that were seen as promoting drug use or were offensive (like the co-ed naked shirts). There was also between kindergarten and 12th grade not a single person that had such bad allergies that it necessitated everyone else being deprived of good food.
I know this has been an old person “get off my lawn!” rant and I apologize. It just sort of feels like schools, at least in the US are becoming more and more pipelines to either prison or lives as corporate automatons instead of institutions of learning. It’s like kids are being prepared to have every minute of their days strictly controlled. I don’t think it’s a big conspiracy, just a cultural shift. It’s scary and it makes me glad I don’t have kids.
Also why does every other kid have allergies or need to be on a special diet these days? I mean, I knew a couple of kids with food allergies growing up but it wasn’t a big deal. Is it some sort of pollutant in the air, food or water that is screwing with people’s bodies? Or is it the result of helicopter parenting and wanting their kids to be special snowflakes? Any thoughts? I’ve read that this is mostly an USian thing. Is that true? It just confuses me because I don’t remember this being a thing in my childhood at all.
I could be wrong but all I’ve seen ralmcg do is link to men’s rights sites. That, and his use of “female” as a noun, is pinging my “is a FE/MRA- dar.
So, 4chan is trying to prove that they’re not misogynist and horrible and have gotten a bad rap by putting out a misogynist and horrible hoax? I’m confused.
Sorry for using the word “female”. I’ll use “girls and women” from now on.
@wwth:
I can’t vouch for this concept, but someone I read often had a post about allergies here. Apparently there are big difference in allergy frequency, and there is also a big difference in gut bacteria in the US vs other places like Sri Lanka.
If this is reverse trolling, it ain’t working because looking at the cesspit of the internet fighting a sleazy viral marketing company just makes normal people hope they burn each other.
I don’t know about special snowflakes, but I read this article not too long ago:
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/03/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/
One of the phrases that stuck with me:
Personally I don’t comprehend “play dates.” People have tried to explain this to me, but it just goes over my head. When I was a kid, a “play date” was going outside and seeing who else was already out there playing, or going up to a friend’s house and knocking on the door. Why is this no longer a thing? Why do parents have to arrange friendships for their kids? These are not questions I expect anyone to answer, because people have tried answering them for me in the past and I still don’t grasp the rationale.
It seems, to me, to be parents wanting to totally manage their kids’ development, presumably so the kids develop correctly? The only adjective that comes to my mind is “smothering,” but I was what was called a the time a “latch-key kid” so this whole concept is utterly alien to me. It may as well be coming from Tau Ceti.
Thank you.
@weirwoodtreehugger
In a way I feel like you because it’s such a pain to pack my kids snack’s for their classrooms. I mean, there’s brands of fruit gummies that they can’t pack because they’re made in a facility with nuts. But, in the end, there are children in my children’s classroom that are soooo sensitive to nuts that they can go into anaphalatic shock just by breathing in a few particles of dust, so its necessary. I don’t know why, but I don’t think there was as severe of a problem with nut allergies back when we were kids.
Of course, my kids like to pack nut granolia bars for lunch and bring them into the classroom for snacks, so I’m on lunchbox checking duty until they learn better. 😉
Kirbywrap,
That’s interesting. Maybe my helicopter parent hypothesis was right. I’m told that kids are far less likely to be allowed outside unsupervised than when I was growing up. That means kids are playing outside less often because they aren’t going unless a parent has the time to go out too. It also seems like kids have more regimented lives with a million activities to do and more homework so they spend less time just running around outside and goofing off. Bad for the body and the imagination.
I rather like the idea that I’m healthy in part because I was a dirty slob of a kid who loved digging for worms!
My mom used to kick us out and make us play outside sometimes. Partially so we didn’t spend too much time in from of the TV and Nintendo and I’m assuming so she could get some space and maybe quiet to do her work (she went back to college when we were kids).
Is that not a thing anymore? How could things change so much in just 20-25 years? Maybe it’s the internet. There’s always something people are panicking about online and there’s always people to tell you you’re doing all the things wrong.
Pro-tip for 4chan trolls: when we say shit like how we’d like to nuke 4chan from orbit, we’re being ironic because we’re exasperated at a community that revels in their horribleness and we can’t express it sufficiently except through hyperbole. At least in the circles I visit, nobody seriously says shit like “we need to censor the internet and shut down 4chan!”. That really does sound more like the exact thing you’d say if you wanted to whip a community of trolls into a white-hot fury.
So my money’s either on “false-flag” – i.e. someone from 4chan knowingly putting this up to have a convenient strawman enemy (“THOUGHT POLICE! FREEZE PEACH!”) – or else it’s not them, but some other group who’s actually trying to play 4chan by getting them riled up. Either way it’s gross, and as David says, the effective ways to prosecute the leaking of private pics have nothing to do with shitty viral marketing schemes.
Also, I guess it would be more accurate to say “vulva” than “labia”, but from my experience dudebros are most confused about what labia and they’re most likely to be the parts that were rawn are so thats what I used. For maximum snark. 😉
That’s actually kinda funny because I’ve heard that increased allergy severity can be traced to better sanitation and an elimination of parasites, who naturally slightly suppress their host’s immune system enough to let them survive, but not enough to hurt the host or make them susceptible to disease. So being a dirty wormy kid is a good thing?
The hypothesis I guess is that your slightly suppressed immune system is less likely to have a lethal allergic reaction when you’re exposed to something you’re allergic to? Gives your immune system a chance to get familiar with the allergen without over reacting, kinda like how allergy shots work. I’d have to do more research, but that’s just a hypothesis I’ve heard.
Wow. If I keep face-palming like this, I’m going to end up breaking my glasses.
The way I’ve heard, it’s about your immune system at an early age learning the difference between what’s part of you and what isn’t. So being exposed to lots of other organisms helps prevent allergies. Western kids have more allergies today because there are fewer farm kids and more big-city kids who don’t have pets or spend a lot of time outdoors.