It takes a particular sort of person to gleefully refer to themselves as “a professional life ruiner,” but that’s exactly who is featured in The Most Hated Man On The Internet, a new true-crime documentary on Netflix.
When Hunter Moore founded isanyoneup.com, a website meant for nights out that turned into something devoted to revenge porn before revenge porn had a name, he discovered a morally reprehensible goldmine.
It is therefore understandable why the documentary team behind programmes like The Tinder Swindler and Don’t F**k With Cats was interested in it. Even we are shocked that it has taken this long.
Therefore, what precisely did Moore do and where is he right now?
What you need to know about him and how he was finally brought down are provided below.
Why is Hunter Moore The Most Hated Man On The Internet?
Moore claims that isanyoneup.com began in 2010 when he intended to create a website to support his crazy party life after returning to his parents’ home in California from Sydney, Australia.
Before Moore decided to share nudes with a friend of “a b***h who destroyed his heart,” the website was dormant for six months after it hit a wall.
He attempted to transmit the pictures over iChat but was unsuccessful, so he decided to use isanyoneup.com to share them without having to worry about his friend saving them on his phone and upsetting his fiancée. The friend started sending photos in response, and before long they had amassed a collection of graphic images on the website.
After then, the site began to gain popularity as more individuals learned about it. Moore was startled to learn that 14,000 individuals had viewed the sites after a month. He included a submission page so that others might start submitting their own images to the website rather than completely deleting it. He was able to make money from ads because to the website’s success.
People could write remarks underneath the photographs, and frequently the photos weren’t placed with authorization. According to the documentary, there have been certain incidents of paraplegic, blind, or otherwise crippled individuals who were up to 70 years old.
Not only did isanyoneup.com publish the images, but it also served as a doxxing website, disseminating details on the ladies in the images. Phone numbers, social media handles, and the places where they live and work would all be included.
The images were easily searchable on Google, so they would appear if a person (such as an employer) looked up the names of the women.
As the website proceeded to degrade women, he rose to the status of someone to be idolised and imitated, which encouraged Moore as he boldly expressed no remorse in interviews.
Women were willing to send their nude bodies to him in order to have a sexual encounter with him, and men wanted to emulate him and follow in his footsteps. But for Moore and his audience, the “joy” came from those who weren’t involved in the sharing of their information.
In order to openly claim ownership of the website, which at its peak received more than 350,000 visits each day, Moore began to embrace internet fandom. Nearly no legislation existed at the time to prevent the distribution of revenge porn.
He refused to remove the pictures, citing the right to free expression and denying any responsibility because the site only housed user-generated content. Cease and desist letters went unread or were even mocked. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 absolves website owners of responsibility for user-posted content (saving Twitter and Facebook from billions in defamation lawsuits).
Teachers, parents, an American Idol competitor, rock band members, and a woman who was photographed in the hospital following surgery were among the casualties.
When more ladies asserted that they had never provided anyone the photographs that were suddenly surfacing on the website, things took an even more terrible turn. They thought they had been compromised.
The women reported the images to the LA police, but were ignored and asked why they were even there. After her daughter Kayla’s photos appeared on the website, Charlotte Laws embarked on a two-year campaign to have Moore removed. She spoke with dozens of women who had been impacted by the website, many of whom thought they had been hacked in order for the photos to be made available in the first place.
Moore went unopposed for over 16 months, with the only significant consequence being a visitor who came to his home with her father and stabbed him in the shoulder with a ballpoint pen after he refused to take her pictures and information down.
He then made fun of his “near with death” in his book, saying that he “felt like Harry Potter,” and even posted pictures of the scar online.
In 2012, the police received the dossier; at the same time, isanyoneup.com was sold to a bullying prevention business.
In a Rolling Stone interview, Moore admitted that “ruining people’s lives with naked images wasn’t the perfect profession,” but he “gets off on generating money” and refused to apologise, stating that he was only monetizing a photograph that was going to be monetized anyhow.
Moore and Charles Evens were both detained on January 23rd in connection with a 15-count indictment (via FBI). This comprised seven counts of aggravated identity theft, seven counts of conspiracy, and seven counts of illegal access to a secured computer.
In February 2015, Moore entered a guilty plea to the allegations that he paid Evens (who went by the online alias Gary Jones) to break into people’s accounts and take their photos before posting them on isanyoneup.com.
Out of a possible five-year penalty, he received a two-and-a-half-year prison term and a $2,000 fine.
Where is Hunter Moore now?
Hunter Moore completed a rehabilitation programme to shorten his term, and as a result, he was released from prison in May 2017.
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