BREAKING: Emma Watson Nude Photo Threat Claimed To Be From Rantic Marketing, Not 4chan

The latest headlines in the stolen celebrity photos story are about the web site EmmaYouAreNext.com, which displays a countdown. This was first publicized by the web site Foxweekly.com which said, "Emma Watson Nude Photos To Be Leaked By 4Chan Hacker?" FoxWeekly has no connection with NewsCorp or Fox News.

The EmmaYouAreNext.com website also contained an image tag saying "Brought to you by 4chan". However, the more thoughtful posters on 4chan and Reddit were skeptical. It was pointed out that Emma Watson had never appeared on any of the lists of celebrities whose privacy had been compromised, and that the countdown always showed the same number whatever timezone you were in. However, one investigator went further, and was able to tie both EmmaYouAreNext.com and FoxWeekly.com back to a company called Rantic Marketing which has a history of similar stunts. In a post on Reddit entitled Emma Watson is NOT Next, a user posting as Gammarays2k14 said: "Its (sic) very likely the whole Emma Watson Leak/Countdown story is an elaborate manipulation cooked up by a marketing company..." All three sites, EmmaYouAreNext, FoxWeekly, and Rantic are using Cloudflare, an anti DDoS service that hides the true location of the web server behind many high bandwidth proxies. However, Gammarays2k14 discovered that they were exposing a server status page, and provided screen shots showing the same server was hosting all three domains. Click for full size versions:

FoxWeekly and Rantic frequently refer to one another - or at least they used to. Since I started writing this blog post, the Rantic web site has been taken down for maintenance. (When I say I story is BREAKING, I mean things are getting broken!) The web site had a comment feature which in the past hour or two had been getting messages like, "Got Emma's nudes?" so maybe they decided to turn off the comment feature.

At the other end, FoxWeekly seems to be scrubbing references to Rantic. Here's an article pulled from Google Cache, that has vanished since yesterday:

Meanwhile, perhaps in response to the time zone criticism, EmmaYouAreNext now says, "WE WILL LAUNCH EARLIER, TUNE IN ON SEPTEMBER 24, 2014 AT 12AM EST." Rantic and FoxWeekly ran a promotion recently in which they claimed that Grand Theft Auto V had been canceled, and that Rantic had been hacked by 4chan in protest. According to PC Gamer "You may have heard a rumor last week that Rockstar had decided to cancel the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V. The word came from a site called Fox Weekly, which quoted the chairman of the marketing firm Rantic as saying that Rockstar never wanted to make a PC version of the game in the first place, but was "forced to do it" because of public demand. The statement carried weight, so the story went, because Rantic was founded by a guy named Brad, who also happens to be a marketing director for Rockstar North." Of course, that story generated a fair amount of publicity for GTA V. The Rantic home page was changed to say "Hacked by 4chan ,Give us our GTA 5 for PC". [caption id="attachment_5688" align="aligncenter" width="365"]

Rantic home page from Wayback Machine, 8/29 through 9/04[/caption] However, nobody on 4chan claimed responsibility for this, and the page remained like that for a week or more, so most likely it was all a publicity stunt. The evidence suggests that Rantic Marketing is a company that has crossed the line and come up with a completely unacceptable publicity stunt. Trying to take advantage of the publicity around the celebrity photo leaks in this way, and dragging another celebrity into the mess is as morally reprehensible as stealing and distributing the photos in the first place. UPDATE 12:08 AM EST, September 24th:The Rantic Media web site is back up, but now with a campaign to censor 4chan! Several images alternate, at the top of the page including these

Since EmmaYouAreNext is protected by Cloudflare, the only people who know how many visitors the site received are the people who set it up. In other words, it looks as if Rantic Marketing set up an abusive web site, blamed it on 4Chan, and are now using it as evidence that 4Chan should be censored. As one of the commenters on the old Rantic Marketing home page said:

UPDATE 5:45 AM EST, September 24th: A poster on 4chan sums it up:

The Rantic home page is still open to comments. While some of the commentators were taken in by the hoax, others are highly critical of Rantic's false flag operation, and some have been defiantly posting links to copies of the stolen photographs. Here's one of the less virulent comments from Rantic's home page.

UPDATE 8:20 AM EST, September 24th: Some background on FoxWeekly and its predecessors, and the hoaxes they have been involved in prior to this one, from The Daily Dot.

In early 2013, the group branded itself SocialVevo, named after the massive video hosting service powered by YouTube. SocialVevo began launching Internet hoaxes targeted at NASA, Family Guy, and Grand Theft Auto. Each hoax was a classic bait-and-switch, driving thousands of people to Swenzy’s homepage, where it sold Facebook likes, YouTube views, and Twitter followers. Swenzy was able to dupe legitimate news sources such as CNN, Time, and Gawker into reporting on its hoaxes—for example, Family Guy’s supposed “countdown” to an announcement about Brian the dog.

UPDATE 9:40 AM EST, September 26th:The Rantic and FoxWeekly websites have been hacked and defaced, probably for real this time. Credit is given to Le 9GAG Army, but this is probably a false flag operation given the history of relations between 9GAG and 4Chan.