Emma watson, fully clothed, at the UN on Saturday
by James Tweedie
What Happened?
A funny thing happened on the internet this week that has left many commentators extremely confused and unsure of how to react.
Last Saturday (September 20), Harry Potter star and United Nations Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson gave a speech at the UN to launch a new gender equality campaign named 'HeForShe'. The video of Ms Watson's speech immediately went 'viral' on the internet, popping up all over Facebook, twitter and other social media websites. It's worth pointing out here that videos like this don't just 'go viral' on their own. There are specialised firms of internet marketers who are paid to promote these things using a variety of underhand methods. The relevance of this will become clear later on.
The next day (Sunday September 21) a new website, 'EmmaYouAreNext.com', appeared, which consisted only of a picture of Emma Watson and a clock counting down from five days. Links to this site were posted on the already controversial website 4Chan.org, along with claims that when the clock reached zero it would reveal nude photos of Emma Watson, obtained by hacking into her mobile phone or internet accounts.
Readers will recall that several famous young female celebrities recently had naked photos of themselves leaked onto the internet. While this was also blamed on 4Chan, they were actually first published on anther site, AnonIB (short for anonymous image board). However, users re-posted the images on 4Chan and the site got the blame.
The internet and even mainstream media exploded in righteous indignation. Dozens of reports, articles and blog posts denounced this latest outrage by the rabid 'Men's Rights Activists' of 4Chan, that notorious den of misogyny and 'rape culture', and were shared all over social media.
Feminists already had more than one reason to hate 4Chan. The site is a nexus for 'geek' culture, which has been the subject of much feminist criticism recently. The 'Ban Fathers' Day' hoax on social network site Twitter this spring, which managed to dupe a number of genuine feminists into supporting it, was supposedly hatched on 4Chan.
The Twitter hate campaign against video blogger Anita Sarkeesian, who criticises sexism in the computer games industry, was also tenuously linked to the so-called 'Arsehole of the Internet' – even though Ms Sarkeesian had promoted the 'Kickstarter' crowd-funding campaign for her video series on 4Chan, reportedly raising thousands of dollars from users.
But some people, either 4Chan users or those who had no particular axe to grind against it, began to smell a rat. EmmaYouAreNext looked just like a previous internet hoax to do with the animated comedy series Family Guy. Some of them started digging. They were obviously on to something because on Wednesday (September 24) the countdown was prematurely cut short and EmmaYouAreNext was revealed to be a stunt by an internet marketing firm called Rantic.
Rantic claimed they were working for unnamed 'celebrity publicists' and had pulled the hoax as part of a campaign to get 4Chan banned and the internet censored. The Rantic site to which EmmaYouAreNext now redirected visitors included an open letter to US President Barack Obama. Within hours the feedback section of the site attracted almost a thousand angry comments.
But all was still not as it seemed. Rantic improbably claimed on its website to have previously worked for some very big names, including Electronic Arts, McDonalds and even NASA. Within a few hours Rantic itself was revealed as a hoax, perpetrated by SocialVEVO, the same informal group of practical jokers (highly skilled in viral marketing) behind the Family Guy prank.
A lot of people were left with egg on their face and a distinct lack of wind in their sails. The whole farrago is just asking to be dramatised as a farcical comedy of errors and brought to the stage in London's West End. They could call it: 'Has Anyone Seen my Breasts?'
What on Earth is 4Chan?
4Chan is a 'bulletin board' website, where users post and reply to messages. The site is image-based, meaning that every original post must be accompanied by an uploaded or linked image. Contrary to what you might have heard, the site is moderated according to a set of rules (which you are constantly reminded to read and agree to), including no posting of material that is illegal in the USA, no racism and no 'trolling' or deliberate provocation, no 'flaming' or making personal attacks on other users.
4Chan claims to receive 20 million individual visitors per month. This is a lot of people by any standard, but in only ranks about 700th in the world (but 260th in the USA and 250th in Britain).
Political correctness has passed 4Chan by, as it has most of the internet and indeed the real world. Users refer to each other and themselves as 'fags'. A new user is a 'newfag', a veteran is an 'oldfag', an author is a 'writefag' and an artist a 'drawfag'. Actual gay people are dubbed 'gayfags'.
Unlike many other special interest forum sites, users don't have to create an account and log in, or even identify themselves by e-mail address to post there. Almost all posts, even on the tame parts of the site, are anonymous.
4Chan has many separate 'boards' for different topics: travel, fashion, science, politics, LGBT, origami, video games, traditional (board and tabletop) games and so on. There are also several boards dedicated to different varieties of pornography, although the site's owners draw the line at 'loli' or child porn and 'furry' or anthropomorphic cartoon animal porn, and 'grotesque' images such as dead or mutilated bodies.
Then there's the notorious 'Random' or /b/ (a suffix to the site's web address) board, where the usual rules no longer apply. This is the page for users to go wild on, spewing filth and bile and insulting each other, writing things that they'd never dare utter aloud and maybe don't even believe. This page has become a meeting place for loonies, trolls, troublemakers and pranksters.
Famous hoaxes said to have originated on /b/ include 'Cut For Bieber', where fans of widely despised teen singing sensation Justin Bieber were encouraged to mutilate themselves to persuade him to stop smoking weed, and the 'Rick Roll', where unsuspecting web surfers are tricked into clicking a link to 80's British pop star Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up'. But some of the pranksters are playing pranks on 4Chan and its users.
4Chan /b/ is what the unbridled internet freedom that liberals, libertarians and anarchists profess to support looks like, and it's not pretty. The anarchistic 'hacktivist' collective Anonymous is not much different, and allegedly started on 4Chan. It's the Wild West of the internet, an example of how, without strict and vigilant moderation, internet and e-mail for a rapidly degenerate into chaos.
It's like a lunatic asylum where the inmates have all been given crayons and told to write their innermost thoughts on the walls. If you go inside and read their ramblings you're going to find a lot of offensive and disturbing stuff. Don't go in there if you're easily shocked. Those who take the stream of psychobabble on 4Chan seriously have themselves taken leave of their senses.
A metaphorical new sheriff in town could clean up 4Chan by not allowing anonymous posts, enforcing all the rules on /b/ and banning pranksters, but then the naughty little boys and girls would just go somewhere else. There's already an '8Chan' website offering all the same cheap thrills and more.
What does it all mean?
A friend of mine at school was a great practical joker. The jape he was most famous for went like this: he would take the ink tube out of a Bic Biro pen and pull the nib off the end. Then he would casually saunter up to to some other kid and dab a spot of ink onto their forehead. The unfortunate recipient would then spit on their hand and try to rub it off, but the Biro ink was so thick and concentrated that they would only succeed in dying their whole forehead and palm a bright indigo colour. The sadistic beauty of it was that the victim had done themselves more harm than the perpetrator, and the result of their foolishness was literally written all over their face. The Emma Watson nude photo hoax was the internet equivalent of the old Biro wheeze.
One of the problems of this incident is that the facts no longer fit the prevailing narrative: that of an internet full of monstrous, angry misogynists peddling 'rape culture', with 4Chan as the chief bogeyman. 4Chan didn't leak Ms Watson's nude photos, nor anyone else's. 4Chan is just a website where people go to talk about shared interests, even if one of those interests is pictures of nude celebrities. Those who fell for this latest hoax are unsure of how to react. Some of the readers leaving comments on the feminist website Jezebel.com were in denial on Wednesday, preferring to believe that 4Chan plotted the whole thing to garner sympathy for itself.
4Chan and its community of users are as much the victim of this practical joke as Emma Watson is. Some will say it serves them right, but who does it serve right? The people posting recipes on the 'food and cooking' board? Or the small minority of anonymous 'fags' giggling away at their own cleverness over on /b/?
Arguably Ms Watson came out of this better than anyone else: she wisely kept schtum, she got a lot of good press and public sympathy out of it, and we never even got to see her boobs!
What this whole sorry saga has shown is that internet activism or 'clicktivism' is a very poor substitute for traditional political organisation, by proving how easy it is to create an 'astroturf' (fake grass-roots) campaign which is able to draw in real, genuinely concerned people. Pulling the same kind of hoax in old-fashioned, bums-on-seats, feet-on-the-streets campaigns would be beyond the capabilities of anyone but the national intelligence services.
'Men's Rights Activism', the spectre currently haunting left-wing and liberal clicktivism, does not exist outside cyberspace. The phenomenon is nothing but a few individuals trolling feminism in general. But since so many feminists have now embraced the internet wholesale, what can you say? No-one likes to be told they've been wasting their time, but sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
The sudden coalescence and equally sudden evaporation of the 15M/Occupy movement across Europe and North America showed that no matter how impressive a spontaneous 'flashmobs' is or how many 'likes' you can get on Facebook, they have no more substance than a puff of smoke. The underlying problem in this case is that so many people, including but by no means limited to feminists, have been lured away from old-fashioned politics by the seductive charms of the internet, the broad(band) way that leads to destruction.