This is all very confusing. Or perhaps it's just me in the midst of a seriously debilitating post-honeymoon haze which is rendering the brain about as useful as nappy that's been washed up on a beach.
The initial thought was "Ah, crap, someone's threatening to leak photos of Emma Watson now, they've a countdown clock and everything. That's really sick." That was followed by "WOW, Emma's managed to orchestrate a gorilla marketing campaign to bring down 4Chan (that being the site pretty much globally blamed for making Jennifer Lawrence's private selfie collection accessible to the debauched everywhere) despite being really busy delivering the most stirring speech to rouse inadvertent feminists to the UN?! I LOVE her!!!" And then the final wave of realisation of "Ooooooh. Emma's essentially being used by Rantic Marketing to bring an end to the nude photo leaks, by way of bringing publicity to Rantic Marketing."
I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this. In theory, it's a good thing that - according to Mashable - "celebrity publicists hired the company to popularize a call for internet censorship and the end of 4chan." Shame they just targeted the one person, which is essentially what bullies do.
Let's backtrack a bit, for those of you experiencing a similar level of confusion. Rantic Marketing are the ones behind EmmaYouAreNext.com. Prior to the latter diverting directly to the Rantic Marketing homepage, it was playing host to a countdown clock to when the "nude pictures" of Emma Watson would reveal themselves.
According to the slide show now being put on by the marketing company, "EMMAYOUARENEXT.COM has reached over 48million visitors, 7 million facebook shares/likes and 3 million Twitter mentions worldwide" before asking us to "join them" to "shutdown 4chan and prevent more private photos from being leaked... None of these women deserve this and together we can make a change." Another woman who really doesn't deserve this is one Emma Watson.
I may be thick as skitter, but shutting down 4Chan isn't going to bring about a revolution of gender equality and stop nude photos of famous women appearing on, you know, the internet at large. It's a start, I suppose, but this is all leaving a bad taste in the gob - especially given a Reddit Thread from Tuesday points to a paste bin document stating that Rantic.com, EmmaYouAreNext.com and FoxWeekly.com all happen to be "hosted on the same server or share at least one server in common." This claim has not yet been confirmed by Mashable.
That aside, and this maybe naivety speaking, but surely there's a better or less damaging way of raising awareness of privacy issues than setting up a sinister website called EMMAYOUARENEXT which gets close to 50million visits... What exactly is that teaching people/hackers with too much time on their hands?
