Is Anyone Up?

» see isanyoneup.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

this belongs to a part of the american internet that never had a turkish edition. in 2011 i was twenty-seven and working in ankara, and the site traveled the way most us tabloid stories traveled, in fragments, months late, attached to a name i could not place. i knew the shape of the story before i knew the name. the name only really crossed over when the law caught up with the man behind it.

it started in late 2010 as a blog run by hunter moore, who was in his twenties in california. people sent in nude photographs of other people, usually ex-partners, and moore posted them. the format hardened quickly into a template. a screenshot lifted from the person's social media profile carried their name and a link straight back to it, and the images ran underneath. the point was never the nudity. the point was that the images arrived attached to an identity, searchable, next to a comment section.

by november 2011 it was doing over thirty million page views a month and clearing something like thirteen thousand dollars against eight thousand in server costs. moore gave interviews. he described himself as a professional life ruiner and repeated that submissions were not his doing, resting on the same section 230 shield that protected every other host of user content. at the time there was almost no law aimed at what the site did. new jersey had criminalized this in 2004 and virtually nowhere else had.

the pressure arrived from every direction except the courts. facebook and paypal cut him off while individual lawsuits piled up. anonymous ran a campaign against him that put his home address online, and he later described the whole thing as an uphill fight. on 19 april 2012 he sold the domain to james mcgibney, who ran an anti-bullying site called bullyville, and it went permanently down that day and redirected. mcgibney said he received thousands of emails afterward, a lot of them from mothers.

~ the case file ~

~ the machine ~

what made this site different from the pornography that had always been on the internet was the metadata. a naked photograph of a stranger is anonymous. the same photograph published beside a full name and a link to a profile becomes a permanent search result for that person, which follows them into every job interview and first date for years. the site was engineered for exactly that outcome, and its audience understood that the identification was the product.

~ what really happened ~

selling the domain did not end it. in january 2014 the fbi arrested moore along with charles evens, alleging that moore had paid evens to break into women's email accounts and steal private photographs to keep the supply coming. that was not a speech question or a section 230 question. it was unauthorized access to a protected computer and aggravated identity theft. moore pleaded guilty in february 2015 and was sentenced that december to two and a half years in federal prison with a fine and restitution. evens got a bit over two years.

~ what replaced it ~

the useful thing to say about this grave is that the law moved because of sites like it. the state wave started in 2013 and by 2025 every state and the district of columbia had a statute against nonconsensual intimate images, with the federal take it down act signed in may of that year adding a forty-eight hour removal requirement for platforms. netflix made a three-part documentary about moore in july 2022, which brought the whole thing back for an audience that had missed it the first time. the site is gone, the pattern is not, and the people who were on it still carry the search results.

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