4Chan Retaliates Against Group Behind Emma Watson Nude Photo Countdown Site

After delivering her much-lauded speech on feminism at the United Nations, Emma Watson was suddenly threatened with the leak of her nude pictures online, if such things really exist. The threat reportedly came from the notorious imageboard site 4Chan, but it was actually from another group. Now 4Chan is fighting back against those responsible for daring to sully its name.

The first round of the celebrity nude photos leak began late August. The photos originated from 4Chan’s /b/ board, the site’s most popular board where pornography and other eyebrow-raising topics are posted.

The scandal, which is distastefully called The Fappening, is currently on its third wave.

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Apart from defending her fellow female celebrities from the attack on Twitter, Watson wasn’t directly involved in the scandal. However, after delivering her U.N. speech, which was generally well received, her name was unwittingly dragged into it.

Read: Nude Photo Leak Scandal: Hackers Target ‘Harry Potter’ Actress Emma Watson After Her UN Speech on Feminism

Hackers have threatened to leak the 24-year-old British actress’ nude photos for not shutting up about feminism. Various reports first claimed that the hackers were the same ones who leaked the nude celebrity photos, and therefore coming from 4Chan again.

The Web site EmmaYouAreNext.com was created, and which was apparently created by 4Chan, a blog site called FoxWeekly claimed. But since there wasn’t evidence that the countdown site was created by 4Chan hackers, Internet sleuths from 4Chan and various imageboard sites including Reddit took on the task of figuring out its real origin. They determined that FoxWeekly and emmayouarenext.com are connected to SocialVevo.

According to the Daily Dot, SocialVevo is the group behind EmmaYouAreNext.com, and is hosted on the same server as a company called Rantic Marketing, which apparently pretended to be 4Chan and threatened to release Watson’s nude pics.

SocialVevo co-founder called “juice” denied that the site was part of emmayouarenext.com, telling the Daily Dot via Skype that 4Chan users mistakenly accuse them of owning the countdown site.

“[T]hose 4channers are just eating on that article you published about the fox site,” juice wrote. “[M]e and simon [one of the other alleged founders of SocialVevo] are trying to find out who owns the countdown too. [I]t started in 4chan. [W]e keep getting our emails hacked by 4chan users and ppl emailing us about the counts its [sic] annoying as f---.”

Hours after the conversation between the SocialVevo co-founder and the Daily Dot, the countdown clock on EmmaYouAreNext.com stopped, and the site now redirects to Rantic.com, which first displayed the hashtag #SHUTDOWN4CHAN on its page. 4Chan expectedly didn’t like Rantic’s hashtag demonstration, and has since defaced the site.

Rantic then decided to shut down its site permanently, apologising to 4Chan for the trouble it caused.

We would like to apologize! We do not want 4chan down nor do we want censorship. 4chan has united the internet and is our family. #KEEP4CHAN

— Rantic (@RanticMarketing) September 25, 2014

It didn’t matter to 4Chan, though. It continued its hacking mission and vandalised FoxWeekly’s page as well.

EmmaYouAreNext.com isn’t the first project of SocialVevo that aims to capitalise on trending topics. It was also responsible for a number of countdown sites, including Rememberthe13th.com, a fake NASA site that claimed that have scientific discovery; BriansAnnouncement.com, which was put up after Brian the dog from “Family Guy” was killed in an episode; and RockStarAnnouncement.com, which promised to leak photos of the next instalment of Grand Theft Auto V.