Creator of Sleazy Revenge Porn Site Wouldn't Care If Someone Killed Themselves Because of It
The Village Voice has an excellent cover story about 26-year-old Hunter Moore, creator of the gross NSFW revenge porn site Is Anyone Up, which offers a venue for spurned lovers and hackers to dump people's private nude pictures, which he posts along with their full name and a screenshot of their Facebook profile. Somehow this guy becomes more vile with every profile.
Of course that's the point. Moore's angling for the role of Hugh Hefner for the Facebook age, only where Hefner pissed off feminists and the religious Right in his day, Moore's approach is to offend anyone who believes in even a nominal right to privacy. (See: Anderson Cooper's barely-veiled contempt when Moore was on his show to be confronted by some of the women whose pics he put up without their consent.) A broad, relevant target, and the enduring media fascination with Moore and his site proves his provocations are working quite well as a PR scheme. There have been a lot of profiles of Moore—this is like the fourth I've read in a year.
Moore, who, according to his profile in the Daily Beast got started as a kind of male pseudo-escort, now has ambitions to leave a similarly large footprint on the culture as Hefner and Playboy with Is Anyone Up. Last year he told me he was planning on creating his own social network. And were once forwarded a breathless email from his publicist trying to drum up interest in Moore's personal brand.
"Hunter Moore is looking to create a brand of entertainment that is far outside the realm of online pornography. Hunter has thrown ragers for parties up and down both coasts bringing his own flare of DJ'ing and Dubstep as well as his infectious sense of a good time."
(Here is a hilarious picture from the Voice of Moore at one of his ragers.)
There may be point at which Moore's lucrative shit-talking get the best of him. He openly boasts to the Village Voice about ignoring DMCA takedown requests from Is Anyone Up's unwilling subjects. And here's a quote from the Village Voice profile, about whether Moore would care if someone committed suicide after being humiliated on his site:
"I do not want anybody to ever be hurt by my site-physically," he says. "I don't give a fuck about emotionally. Deal with it. Obviously, I'd get a ton of heat for it. But-I'm gonna sound like the most evil motherfucker-let's be real for a second: If somebody killed themselves over that? Do you know how much money I'd make? At the end of the day, I do not want anybody to hurt themselves. But if they do? Thank you for the money."
Though many people—including Facebook—have sent him legal threats, Moore has yet to be sued. But as Forbes' Kashmir Hill has pointed out, Moore could be held liable if a lawyer could prove that Is Anyone Up exists "simply for the purpose of privacy invasion and intentional infliction of emotional distress." Statements like the above, along with posts that feature captions like "Kelsey is a little slut from Pittsburgh whose clit deserves some attention," might some day come back to bite Moore in court.