Who is the most hated person on the Internet? It may seem like a ridiculous question, given the knowledge that the Internet contains vast multitudes of identities and people too numerous to count, with a never-ending parade of good and bad. 

If you type “Hunter Moore” into an online search engine, the phrase “most hated person on the Internet” comes up immediately. Moore is 27 years old and has had quite the impressive run thus far in terms of establishing himself as a fearsome online presence. If you haven’t heard of Moore, you are probably wondering what exactly he has done to earn his notorious title. 

In short, Moore has spent the last three years of his life capitalizing on women forced into horrendously compromising positions. As the so-called “revenge porn king,” he made his living taking submissions of nude photographs of former lovers from angry ex-boyfriends. 

Moore didn’t just post the photos—he made sure the women’s lives were ruined. He collected home addresses, personal phone numbers, work information and social media information. He ensured the photos would come up if anyone searched for the names of the women online, making it possible for reputations to be destroyed in a matter of hours. Rolling Stone reported that at its peak, Moore’s website, isanyoneup.com, received nearly 350,000 hits a day. The website’s proud slogan, “Pure Evil,” was certainly not undeserved. 

The problem, of course, was that it was extremely difficult to legally charge Moore for his actions. While he did not hide his identity, revenge porn is not, amazingly, illegal. So long as the images were submitted by someone else, a legal loophole existed that allowed isanyoneup.com to operate. Moore was careful to make sure those depicted in the submissions to the website were older than 18. 

Once he legally cleared that hurdle, he was free to upload the images for the mockery of those who prowl the lowest depths of the Internet. Those who discovered their nude images more often than not attempted to sue Moore, to no avail. At the very least, most victims wanted their photos off the website. Though some were successful, it often did little to erase the damage done by the images being available for however long isanyoneup.com kept them live and linked to all major contact information. From 2011 to the end of 2012, Moore systematically netted nearly $13,000 in profit per month from the website while earning a reputation as a man with no morals. 

In April, isanyoneup.com was shut down and sold to an anti-bullying website. This bizarre end of the revenge porn website was not founded in a change of heart or anything of the sort; Moore sold the website with the intent of drawing in more publicity while planning the eventual reboot. In a recent interview with Vice, Moore stated that his planned reopening of isanyoneup.com, tentatively called IAU2, will be infinitely worse than its predecessor. 

“Basically, it’s going to change the Internet, it’s going to make the Internet very, very scary,” Moore said.

During the week of Jan. 15, Moore was arrested for hacking. It came to light that some of the nude photos posted to isanyoneup.com were not submitted by a spiteful ex-lover at all—Moore had figured out a way to hack personal computers and take saved images directly from the sources themselves, which is a violation of federal law. 

While it is fair to say in this day and age that it is simply not safe to take nude photographs of yourself, for personal or shared use, in these cases, the photos never even left these women’s computers. Kayla Law, a victim who helped lead the legal battle with the FBI against Moore that has finally led to his recent arrest, recalled that the photos she found of herself online were taken personally for modeling portfolio purposes, stored into her laptop’s database and unopened for months. It was only after receiving a frantic phone call from her mother, who had searched her daughter’s name for benign purposes and discovered she was naked on the Internet, that Law discovered her computer had been hacked. 

 As of today, according to The New Yorker, Moore is free on bail, awaiting trial in the spring. He is not allowed access to a computer in the meantime, and reportedly is staying with his parents for fear of his life. It is likely his hacking crimes will earn him time in prison, hopefully meaning his dream of launching IAU2 will never come into being. But Moore’s case, in this age of the Internet, will not be unique. If Moore is unable to re-launch isanyoneup.com, someone else will do something similar. Laws must be changed to protect people from losing their credibility and becoming victims of revenge porn. Until then, people who will follow Moore will continue to thrive in the dark underbelly of the Internet.

Send Justine your thoughts at technician-viewpoint@ncsu.edu.