Netflix’s ‘The Most Hated Man On The Internet’ Gives A Chilling Look Into The Realities Of Taking Nude Photos

Boastful, arbiter of chaos, and constantly having his ego boosted even further by hordes of devoted followers proclaiming their love and praise for him, Hunter Moore amassed a “cult” of scene kids. He was their shepherd and “The Family” was his sheep, creating a protected niche on the internet for depraved, predatory behavior. Whether the men and women (and in some cases, underaged boys and girls) had willingly sent their nude photographs to a girlfriend or boyfriend, Moore was apathetic to just how many lives he could've been ruining.

What Earns Someone the Title of Most Hated Man on the Internet?

​​From the creators of the Netflix documentaries The Tinder Swindler and Don’t F**K with Cats came “The Most Hated Man on the Internet,” a three-part true crime exposé of the scene community’s revenge porn hub IsAnyoneUp gone way, way wrong. Throughout the three episodes, you hear testimony from heartbroken women whose nude pictures ended up plastered all over the website, created and maintained by the supposed “revenge porn king,” known as Hunter Moore.

You remember the look, right? The typical MySpace “scene kid” who wasn’t fully emo but certainly wasn’t prep, who loved pop punk, crunk, screamo, and anything in between, wore fluffy, layered haircuts, and likely shopped exclusively at Hot Topic for band tees and ripped jeans. Moore was a product of the worst corners of this community, but his impact grew exponentially outside his little internet niche. 

From 2011 to 2012, Moore’s website IsAnyoneUp welcomed submissions of intimate photos from exes to create full profiles on both women and men. The profiles essentially doxxed unwilling victims, acting as a hub for their private, personal information and social media links.

Countless news programs and top media outlets flocked to how outrageous Hunter Moore was, to the extent where it almost felt as though the media was aiding and abetting his rise. Moore was violating the privacy of thousands of men and women alike, and luckily, there were a few individuals who stood up to call out his deviant actions.

A Quick Dive into the Key Players and the Most Shocking Bits

The “heroine” of this three-part docuseries was Charlotte Laws, a former Hollywood scene crasher, whose daughter Kayla was beside herself when she discovered that her nude photos that had allegedly not been sent to anyone ended up on Hunter Moore’s website. When law enforcement officials weren’t working fast enough for her, Laws took it upon herself to investigate Moore, speak with over 40 other victims, and share her compiled evidence with the FBI in an effort to shut down IsAnyoneUp.

Another shocking testimony shared against Hunter Moore was by infamous camgirl and sex worker Destiny Benedict. Benedict was an online sex worker before appearing on IsAnyoneUp. According to the documentary, Benedict thought that appearing on IsAnyoneUp could be lucrative and help drive viewers to her own camgirl pages. But unbeknownst to Benedict, photos of her children ended up on her IsAnyoneUp profile.

Benedict’s thought process was to post more lewd photos of herself on the website as leverage to have the photos of her now-estranged children taken down, but her plan backfired monumentally. Benedict felt violated when Moore allegedly recorded intimate sessions without her consent where she would stick objects up her butt. This incident earned Benedict the nickname of “Butthole Girl,” and would lead to her alienation from her first three kids.

The rest of Hunter Moore’s public life was full of wild, unabashed parties, hard drugs, alcohol, and a lot of sex. Rolling Stone journalist Alex Morris was assigned to cover his DJ and party lifestyle while on tour in 2012. She wrote about the shocking mayhem which Moore claimed was “pretty gangster.”

"I mean, first of all, he was doing coke. He's drinking a lot. But women were just lining up outside the green room to sleep with him. It wasn't just about having sex. It was about what he could do for shock value to post online. So, he was having women do lines of coke off of his penis. He was drinking vodka out of their vaginas. It was like Howard Stern meets 'Jackass' every single night,” Morris shared in the documentary.

Without giving away too many spoilers, one particularly entertaining part was when the infamous conglomerate known as “Anonymous” cleverly took action against Hunter Moore in “an eye for an eye” fashion by temporarily erasing his Social Security Number, declaring him legally dead for a few weeks, shipping him hundreds of sex toys in the mail, hacking his bank account and even transferring his funds to women’s shelters. Perhaps it’s petty revenge, but the actions of internet trolls infuriated with Hunter Moore served him an extra dose of justice that the justice system itself couldn’t seem to muster.

After all that transpired, Hunter Moore only served 30 months in prison. He feigned innocence and assumed a remorseful persona, despite having been over-the-top boastful about his “FYE” while operating IsAnyoneUp.

In addition, Hunter Moore didn’t participate in the Netflix documentary, yet has now taken to Twitter to insist that he was portrayed in an unfair light. 

No Technology Connected to the Internet Is Safe from Hacking

As we learn in The Most Hated Man on the Internet, many people had their emails hacked by simple scams on things like Facebook Messenger where fake accounts posing as your friend would ask for help resetting an email password but instead trick you into resetting your own. The hacker would log in and change your password. If you noticed it happened to you, you might change your password back but then not realize that the hacker had also placed their own email address as a backup so that they’d always have access to your accounts.

For many victims, this was a nightmare. Skeptics may wonder why in the world so many people had nudes in their email accounts, but remember just how little storage early smartphones had and there was no Cloud storage availability yet.

The overall lesson learned from this documentary is a cautionary tale for sure but is it really anything new? Throughout history, there have always been bad actors who are malicious and greedy, preying on the naive who are trusting and ignorant. And today, they have the internet and technology at their disposal. So what’s the antidote? Well, education, for starters. Education about how technology can be used to hurt you and its actual privacy/safety capabilities. Education about the risks of a digital footprint, whether that’s on your own iPhone or on social media. Education and support for how to appropriately manage the pain and emotions of a breakup, in ways that exclude revenge hookups and revenge porn. And also, virtue – specifically, respecting the dignity of the human body and the sacredness of sex, prudence, and considerateness. 

Revenge Porn Isn’t Trivial, Especially to the Victims

We’ve heard of countless cases where female celebrities like Mary Elizabeth Winstead or Jennifer Lawrence have their private, nude photographs stolen and then posted online for the entire world to view. While they get disseminated quickly through social media, most people seem to not bat an eye because the people in the photos are celebrities – far removed from any meaningful role in the viewer’s lives – who often have their personas on display for the public, albeit usually a bit more clothed. Yet just because they’re always being snapped by paparazzi and professionals alike, do those women deserve to be reduced to a commodity traded like baseball cards?

Leaked nude images can’t be taken back like credit card companies or banks forgiving stolen money from ATM fraud. Leaked nude images online can’t be destroyed like physical photographs because there’s no end to the number of devices and servers that could publicly or secretly host those photos forever.

Some brush the problem aside as if it’s easy to just wave away the despair of victims who have had their privacy breached with statements like “Here’s a tip, don’t take naked pics.” Yes, of course, there are plenty of men and women who wouldn’t think to take those photos in the first place, but their personal code of ethics doesn’t justify the rights of others being invaded.

Some think no one other than their boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife will ever see the photos, some are coerced into it, some have photos taken while asleep, and some are now even deepfaked. 

Between the women and men interviewed in the documentary and the countless others who have been victims of “revenge porn,” too many have reported feeling permanently exposed, needing therapy, and being left to wonder what will happen if future employers Google their names. Some have had to change their entire appearance, and others have chosen to get new, legal names and change cities. 

Closing Thoughts

Hunter Moore’s IsAnyoneUp hasn’t been the only culprit in the rise of “revenge porn” blackmail. In 2010, Gawker published a video of a very intoxicated, young woman having sex in a sports bar bathroom. She begged for the website to remove the video, even alleging that it wasn’t consensual, but Gawker had refused to take it down. 

As you may remember, Gawker itself was finally taken down after their publishing of Hulk Hogan’s secretly recorded sex tape ended in a highly publicized lawsuit. Once they did, however, it was too late, and other websites had already reposted it.  

In response to the “revenge porn” problem growing so pertinent in our internet-savvy society, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has published entire guides on what a person can do if they’re a target of revenge porn. “Non-consensual pornography,” as they also call it, has laws against it in 46 states as well as the District of Columbia – which I learned from the Netflix documentary can be attributed to the efforts of women like Charlotte Laws. The FTC directs victims to the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative’s Online Removal Guide, advises seeking legal action, and provides victims with the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative’s crisis hotline: 844-878-CCRI (2274).

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