A shock site is a website that is intended to be offensive or disturbing to its viewers, though it can also contain elements of humor or evoke sexual arousal. Shock-oriented websites generally contain material such as pornographic, scatological, racist, antisemitic, sexist, graphically violent, insulting, vulgar, profane, or otherwise some other provocative nature. Websites that are primarily fixated on real death and graphic violence are particularly referred to as gore sites. Some shock sites display a single picture, animation, video clip or small gallery, and are circulated via email or disguised in posts to discussion sites as a prank. Steven Jones distinguishes these sites from those that collect galleries where users search for shocking content, such as Rotten.com. Gallery sites can contain beheadings, execution, electrocution, suicide, murder, stoning, torching, police brutality, hangings, terrorism, cartel violence, drowning, vehicular accidents, war victims, rape, necrophilia, genital mutilation and other sexual crimes.
SuicideGirls is an online community-based website that revolves around pin-up photography sets of models known as the Suicide Girls.
Charlotte Anne Laws, also known by her stage name Missy Laws, is an American author, talk show host, animal rights advocate, anti-revenge porn activist, former politician, and actress. Laws is a former BBC News contributor and was a weekly commentator on KNBC-TV's The Filter with Fred Roggin from 2009 to 2013. She also co-hosted the Internet show,' Every Way Woman (2008–2013) and hosted a local television show called "Uncommon Sense" from October 2007 to September 2010.
There has been demand for imagery of nude celebrities for many decades. It is a lucrative business exploited by websites and magazines.
Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.
Amateur pornography is a category of pornography that features models, actors or non-professionals performing without pay, or actors for whom this material is not their only paid modeling work. Reality pornography is professionally made pornography that seeks to emulate the style of amateur pornography. Amateur pornography has been called one of the most profitable and long-lasting genres of pornography.
Internet pornography is any pornography that is accessible over the Internet; primarily via websites, FTP connections, peer-to-peer file sharing, or Usenet newsgroups. The greater accessibility of the World Wide Web from the late 1990s led to an incremental growth of Internet pornography, the use of which among adolescents and adults has since become increasingly popular.
Sexting is sending, receiving, or forwarding sexually explicit messages, photographs, or videos, primarily between mobile phones. It may also include the use of a computer or any digital device. The term was first popularized early in the 21st century and is a portmanteau of sex and texting, where the latter is meant in the wide sense of sending a text possibly with images. Sexting is not an isolated phenomenon but one of many different types of sexual interaction in digital contexts that is related to sexual arousal.
The Gay Nigger Association of America (GNAA) was an internet trolling group. They targeted several prominent websites and internet personalities including Slashdot, Wikipedia, CNN, Barack Obama, Alex Jones, and prominent members of the blogosphere. They also released software products, and leaked screenshots and information about upcoming operating systems. In addition, they maintained a software repository and a wiki-based site dedicated to internet commentary.
Hunter Edward Moore is an American convicted criminal from Sacramento, California. Rolling Stone called him "the most hated man on the Internet." In 2010, he created the revenge porn website Is Anyone Up? which allowed users to post sexually explicit photos of people online without their consent, often accompanied by personal information such as their names and addresses. He refused to take down pictures on request. Moore called himself "a professional life ruiner" and compared himself to Charles Manson. The website was up for 16 months, during which Moore stated several times he was protected by the same laws that protect Facebook. Moore also paid a hacker to break into email accounts of victims and steal private photos to post.
Is Anybody Down? was a revenge porn website founded by Craig Brittain and Chance Trahan where users could anonymously upload nude photographs along with information identifying the person in the photograph. The site also contained a section of nude photographs titled "Anonymous Bounty", where users were offered "free stuff" if they could provide the Facebook or Twitter information of any of the people pictured. In concept, the website recapitulated the now-defunct Is Anyone Up?, which was shut down in April 2012, shortly before an FBI investigation into the propriety of the site.
James McGibney is an American entrepreneur and former Marine. He is the CEO and founder of Las Vegas, Nevada based ViaView, Inc., which owns and operates the web sites BullyVille.com, CheaterVille.com, KarmaVille.com, and DramaVille.com.
Revenge porn is the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their consent. The material may have been made by a partner in an intimate relationship with the knowledge and consent of the subject at the time, or it may have been made without their knowledge. The subject may have experienced sexual violence during the recording of the material, in some cases facilitated by narcotics such as date rape drugs which also cause a reduced sense of pain and involvement in the sexual act, dissociative effects and amnesia. The possession of the material may be used by the perpetrators to blackmail the subjects into performing other sexual acts, to coerce them into continuing a relationship or to punish them for ending one, to silence them, to damage their reputation, and/or for financial gain. In the wake of civil lawsuits and the increasing numbers of reported incidents, legislation has been passed in a number of countries and jurisdictions to outlaw the practice, though approaches have varied and been changed over the years. The practice has also been described as a form of psychological abuse and domestic violence, as well as a form of sexual abuse.
MyEx.com was a controversial, free revenge porn website focusing on nude photographs of people posted by former lovers along with their real names.
On August 31, 2014, a collection of nearly five hundred private pictures of various celebrities, mostly women, with many containing nudity, were posted on the imageboard 4chan, and swiftly disseminated by other users on websites and social networks such as Imgur and Reddit. The leak has been popularly dubbed "The Fappening" and also "Celebgate". The images were initially believed to have been obtained via a breach of Apple's cloud services suite iCloud, or a security issue in the iCloud API which allowed them to make unlimited attempts at guessing victims' passwords. Apple claimed in a press release that access was gained via spear phishing attacks.
Playpen was a notorious darknet child pornography website that operated from August 2014 to March 2015. The website operated through the Tor network which allowed users to use the website anonymously. After running the website for 6 months, the website owner Steven W. Chase was captured by the FBI. After his capture, the FBI continued to run the website for another 13 days as part of Operation Pacifier.
Fake nude photography is the creation of nude photographs designed to appear as genuine nudes of an individual. The motivations for the creation of these modified photographs include sexual gratification, the stigmatization or embarrassment of the subject, and commercial gain, such as through the sale of the photographs via pornographic websites. Fakes can be created using image editing software or through machine learning. Fake pornographic images created using the latter method are called deepfakes.
Deepfake pornography, or simply fake pornography, is a type of synthetic porn that is created via altering already-existing pornographic material by applying deepfake technology to the faces of the actors. The use of deepfake porn has sparked controversy because it involves the making and sharing of realistic videos featuring non-consenting individuals, typically female celebrities, and is sometimes used for revenge porn. Efforts are being made to combat these ethical concerns through legislation and technology-based solutions.
The Most Hated Man on the Internet is a 2022 American three-part Netflix docuseries that covers the story of Hunter Moore and his website Is Anyone Up?, a pornographic site based on stolen and hacked photos, and the struggle to take the website down. It focuses on the story of Charlotte Laws as she tries to remove her daughter's nude photos from the website.
Wesley Liu Hsu is an American judge who is serving as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Central District of California. He previously served as a judge of the Los Angeles County Superior Court from California from 2017 to 2023.
