“The Most Hated Man on the Internet,” Netflix
It happened in 2012, when hundreds of young people, mostly young women, discovered to their dismay that their nude photos were published on a website. The site’s creator, Hunter Moore, mockingly ignored their pleas to remove the images. Until one mother decided to fight him back
Kayla Luz, a young American woman, was in the middle of a shift as a hostess at a restaurant, when her phone rang. On the other end of the line was her friend who asked her in a panic if she had seen her picture posted on the IsAnyoneUp website. Kayla, who didn’t know about the site’s existence until that moment, entered it and infiltrated it. A nude photo of her alongside other photos in inviting poses were displayed on the website, plus photographs of her home pages on social networks, which invited anyone who was interested to reach her home and her phone number with only a small effort.
The phones did not take long to arrive. In a short time Kayla’s phone memory was filled with hundreds of messages from strangers she didn’t know, and all of them had sexual content. The shocked Kayla tried to understand how these photos were leaked to the website: she took them in her room as a personal amusement. She didn’t send them to anyone – not even her close friends. When her phone memory was full, she transferred them to her personal e-mail and moreover did not move the photos to another place. She left the workplace, rushed home and collapsed on the bed crying.
After she told her mother what had happened, they both began to check the site. IsAnyoneUp, they discovered, is a software platform written by a young man named Hunter Moore. The software invited people to drive – simply – maliciously. To upload nude photos of other people, usually girlfriends and ex-partners, with photographs or references to their cover pages on social networks in a way that would spread information that the people photographed did not want to reach the masses, and cause them great embarrassment. And in short – revenge porn.
Hunter Moore’s motive, as it became clear to Kayla Luz later, was a lot of website traffic that brought him advertising and money, as well as an ego. Moore was an ego maniac who was indifferent to the fact that the photos on the site caused great grief to the women photographed, so much so that some of them locked themselves in their homes, turned their backs on their lives and even tried to commit suicide. Every attempt to contact him asking him to remove the photos was met with a sneering refusal. Moore was at the peak of success, interviewed on television and in the print press, the traffic on his website only continued to grow. In the wild American media culture he became a celebrity, he lived his dream and told no one.
Kayla Luz, with the help of her parents, Barbara and Peter, managed to remove her photos from the site and was one of the few who did the deed. But Barbara was not satisfied with her success in helping her daughter. She decided to turn the fight against Hunter Moore into a crusade against the man and the site he created. She contacted dozens of women and men who were affected by the site, collected their testimonies, activated and urged the FBI, which in the meantime deciphered how Moore obtained private nude photos from email addresses.
Single spoiler: Barbara Luz eventually managed to take down Hunter Moore. The three-part series “The Most Hated Man on the Internet” documents Barbara’s struggle and her pursuit of the hated Internet bully, whose dubious nickname, by the way, was given to him by Rolling Stone magazine. The story, it is important to note, took place in 2012, when cyberbullying was in its infancy and laws against it did not exist. The situation is not much better today. But in those days Hunter Moore was considered in many places to be no more naughty. A man who took the Internet forward, who thought of an original idea that had not been thought of before. He was interviewed on TV channels, articles were written about him. The suffering of the women and men who appeared involuntarily on the site is neither counted nor considered. Today, although the legal situation has not changed, the criteria have changed, and Hunter Moore would not pass through the net. Here’s another spoiler, one last and enough: don’t bother searching the Internet for ?IsAnyoneUp. He has not been online for many years.
To see or to give up: to see. A modern parable about a naked and evil king.