How Rantic PR Fooled the Guardian With Fake Emma Watson Nude Leaks
On September 20th, Emma Watson spoke at the UN about her new campaign on sexism.
You can view the video here.
Shortly after, Fox Weekly (not to be confused with Fox News), published a story that alleged that an “anonymous 4chan hacker” possessed nude photographs of Emma Watson and had created a website which would reveal said photos in several days.
The website EmmaYouAreNext showed a countdown with days, hours and minutes before the time of the release. It also showed a modified image of Emma Watson’s head, as well as the logo of 4chan.
Screenshot of the emmayouarenext.com website.
Interestingly, interviews with veteran 4chan users showed that displaying the 4chan logo, as did the website, is highly atypical for any actual 4chan user.
The article on Fox Weekly stated:
EmmaYouAreNext.com is the name of a strange countdown clock website that has originated from 4chan. The site appears to have come from the same leaker who has recently published nude photos of Rihanna and Gabrielle Union. The countdown ends in about 5 days.
We are currently following leads and finding out what exactly is the website about. Social media and forums are speculating that the notorious 4chan is about to leak an Emma Watson sex tape or nude photos.
We still cannot find the person who owns the site and numerous IP address traces come out empty.
Our news staff have reached out to 4chan users to help find the creator of the site.
This all comes after the notorious 4chan hacker leaked nude photos of Rihanna, Vanessa Hudgens, Kim Kardashian and Gabrielle Union on Sunday. The leaker also leaked Jennifer Lawrence nude photos a few weeks ago.
Emma Watson recently gave a strong emotional speech at the United Nations about female equality in politics.
The article claims that the leaker is the same person as the person that leaked the Rihanna and Gabrielle Union photographs. This is a big assumption to make, because the method of dissemination is very different – this time, an entire website has been set up to announce the leaks.
Furthermore, the article claims that “we still cannot find the person who owns the site”. 4chan’s founder, Moot (Christopher Poole), is considered an internet celebrity. He has appeared in-person at numerous conferences and can be easily reached via Twitter and Email.
The story from Fox Weekly was quickly republished by major news outlets, such as the Guardian, The Independent, The Toronto Sun, the BBC, the Telegraph and CNN, who hastily re-published the Fox Weekly story.
However, all outlets appear to have fallen victim to a planned marketing campaign by a PR firm.
What follows is a screenshot of the Apache Server Status for the website www.emmayouarenext.com:
Server logs, showing that both websites were hosted on the same server.
According to the server logs, the emmayouarenext.com website is hosted on the same server as the homepage of a PR company, Rantic Marketing.
What is Rantic? Rantic Marketing is a PR company that utilises viral strategies for its customers. Some customers that Rantic claims to have worked for include Mac Donald’s, the National Aeronautics and Space Association, Steam, Electronic Arts and other important gaming companies.
Another oddity in this case was the barrage of identical tweets that were released within a minute of each other linking directly to the website:
Similar tweets.
All of the people who tweeted the story are following Rantic Marketing on Twitter. Rantic Marketing rarely make any tweets themselves, but as one 4chan user noted,
“as soon as we started digging they became very active.”
This posses the possibility that Rantic-staff have been monitoring the boards of 4chan.
Rantic PR tweet to Fox Weekly, at the bottom.
On September 17th, Rantic posted a tweet thanking Fox Weekly for “the downtime you have caused us by summoning the wrath of 4chan”. This tweet was made 4 days before Emma Watson gave her speech.
(This is pure speculation, but it may be possible that Rantic Marketing, or one of their clients, was caught up in the Gamer Gate scandal and have retorted by creating this fake story and framing it on 4chan.)
It is also noteworthy that Fox Weekly was the first website to report on the emmayouarenext.com website.
The whole affair took a turn when 4chan users discovered that Fox Weekly is not a real news site, but a group of social media manipulators who already have a reputation for their internet hoaxes that drive traffic to their site for advertising revenue.
This group was formerly known as SocialVEVO and was connected to NASA, GTA5, Family Guy (related to Brian’s death hoax) and other companies they have claimed to work for.
Fox Weekly could not be reached for comment. The emails contacted were and .
We were also unable to contact Rantic, whose website went down around exactly during our research at 2014-09-23 21:55 GMT-5. Attached is a screenshot of the current website, displaying “Maintenance Mode”.
A screenshot of the Rantic PR website in maintenance mode.
New developments
Update at 2014-09-24 23:58 GMT-5
This is a developing story. It appears Rantic is not at all trying to hide the fact that they’re behind the website – the website emmayouarenext.com is part of a larger PR plan against 4chan in response to the nude leaks originating from the very image board. The Rantic website – that was under maintenance for a while, see the screenshot above – is now showing a new website:
Screenshot of the newly uploaded website on rantic.com
The hashtag #shutdown4chan thus belongs to a prepared campaign. The plan appears to have been
- Publicize the emmayouarenext.com website through mainstream media, such as the Guardian, BBC, CNN, etc.
- Leak technical information on 4chan that appear to be exposing the website as the works of a PR firm. These leaks would then be shared by angered internet users, making the rantic.com website temporarily very popular.
- During this popularity, change the rantic.com content to the content of their #shutdown4chan campaign. This would ensure maximum exposure of their campaign and their message, which is as follows:
Message to be spread through the rantic.com website at the peak of their popularity.
Update 2014-09-24 00:36 GMT-5
A brilliant reader has submitted the following observation to us by email:
There are actually two possibilities.
1. This was all planned by Rantic from the beginning. The idea was, fake a server log leak (I actually didn’t you know you could get to the Apache Status page that easily), get 4channers enraged thinking they’re getting false-flagged by a celebrity PR company, make the enraged 4channers post lots of things on social media pointing to rantic.com, and then switch the content of rantic.com, making 4chan get bad publicity from the views it caused itself.OR2. They just planned the emmayouarenext.com website. They wanted to pretend they are 4chan, so people would turn against bad 4chan that is about to leak again. They screwed up the server logs, and got exposed by a 4channer. Trying to save their skin, they pulled a smart move and pretend this was part of a long planned marketing campaign against 4chan.
However, one of our followers on Twitter claims the Apache server logs are not fake:
So far, his claims could not be verified, but neither could they be confirmed as untrue.
Update 2014-09-24 01:31 GMT-5 – A completely different view – the inside troll job
As you may have noticed by now, most of the attempts to explain Rantic are based on speculation. Nevertheless, we would like to share all possibilities behind the recent events:
Another plausible explanation for Rantic is an inside troll job. No proof has come out so far that there is an actual, professional marketing firm behind the website emmayouarenext.com. In fact, should it be proven that the emmayouarenext.com website was orchestrated by a PR firm, the firm might expose itself to defamation lawsuits. It would have knowingly and willingly publicized the false information that 4chan is guilty of yet another leak. Furthermore, addressing the petition to shut down a particular website to President Obama is equally bizarre, especially since Rantic’s statement also pleads for internet censorship.
Fox Weekly has existed for a longer time, but both Rantic and the emmayouarenext.com website are new creations. It is perfectly possible that those two are the works of a master troll. Another clue for this theory would be the current tweets by @RanticMarketing:
Update 2014-09-24 02:45 GMT-5
Rantic.com appears to have been a record label some eleven years ago:
Rantic.com website in 2003.
The original article was made possible thanks to the research of numerous anonymous users of 4chan’s /pol/ board.
Source of the original thread: http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/36272301/
ayy
lmao
SHUT IT DOWN
These fucking bitches need to be put in their place. Why must they attack 4chan, home of the white man. I just want to have a little corner of the Internet to chill with my fellow Internet Nazi’s and blow off steam about Niggers and Jews. But I can’t even have that. I’m glad I dedicated my life to exposing these JIDF shills. Insha Allah,
Your buddy Ben
ayyyy lmao
Oy vey!!! This is another shoah, remember the six quadrillion!!
So if rantic is behind it, and rantic is a pr company, does that mean Emma Watson herself is behind this whole shitfest?
No, it could be something like the Westborro Baptist Church group.
AYY LMAO.
I want to cum inside Rainbow Dash
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check my dubs
Check out their website now. It looks like they’re striking back against 4chan by trying to steer the message towards 4chan being the bad guys. This is even though we’ve uncovered evidence of their wrongdoings.
I’m mixed on this because not even 2 weeks ago, moot (owner of 4chan) pretty much came out and said that HE was going to censor discussion (a different situation than the leaks, but the same result overall). A lot of 4chan actually moved to 8chan as a result. So does this help 8chan?
not if the majority of the people still think that GG is tied with 4chan and are unaware of the shift
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Anon has forced Rantic’s hand. They were forced to go early and now are pulling a #SHUTDOWN4CHAN operation.
I hope Emma sees this article and my comment.
There are just too many things wrong here to ignore. Rantic is hiding a lot – especially with there sporadic, fishy behavior that is all targeted in taking down a website through manipulation. It is just way to conveniently timed, and when members of 4chan started digging they became very active. It’s like they discovered something that Rantic wanted to hide. Cyber warfare at its worst, and the social media is eating it all up. Please, Emma and all other news sources, see the truth and at least give 4chan a break.
This is a very serious framing happening here. Do not ignore the evidence due to your ignorance. Exposing Rantic, might I remind you, could be any national news website’s biggest article of the year.
Holy shit can we please stop trying to guess who is behind Rantic or even pretending it’s a real company?
It’s fucking verifiable that Rantic is a fake company that was entirely created by FoxWeekly. FoxWeekly was the first to publish anything about the fake GTA V interview with Rantic, and they were the first to publish anything about emmaisnext.com, too. FoxWeekly, by the way, is an actual, real “news” website with years of posts, a wikipedia article, an office, etc.
On their site they say their founder is Brad Cockingham, and the only information I can find on his is on FoxWeekly or related to the GTA V on PC scandle from a while ago (Which, spoilers, was a fake interview with Rantic posted on FoxWeekly).
There’s this picture of “Brad Cockingham” hosted directly on FoxWeekly, but, if you reverse image search it you can see it’s from a set of pictures from a company called Kobie Marketing, a totally real marketing firm and probably unrelated to any of this.
Picture:
http://www.foxweekly.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/brad-cockingham.jpg
Source: (Cached because GlassDoor is down for maitanance)
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nr_na47zG1MJ:www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/vice-president-finance-and-administration-reviews-SRCH_KO0,41.htm+&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca
So Rantic appeared out of nowhere recently, they were first mentioned on FoxWeekly about the GTAV stuff, their twitter followers are obviously all bots, there’s zero information on them outside of FoxWeekly and they have a fake founder/CEO and no headquarters anywhere.
Rantic is so much of a fake company that I can’t possibly imagine this is all a PR stunt for them. It’s not a marketing firm, plain and simple.
Now I have no idea why FoxWeekly made up this company and then proceeded to pull the emmaisnext.com stunt – but stop pretending like Rantic is a company or entity at all and stop wondering who is behind it, because it’s FoxWeekly’s creation.
Doesn’t this just lend even less legitimacy to mainstream online journalism?
thanks /pol/ this puppet master will be brought to light thanks to your endeavors
and you will continue to be un-sung heros of free speech for generations to come
I thank you
So Rantic Marketing was publicly threatening Emma Watson and making her fans look like fools for getting upset, I don’t think that’s a brilliant marketing scheme at all, when fans realize Emma had either hired Rantic or allowed them to use her name to insult her fans intelligence …. ‘She’ may not like the results.
Normalizing rape culture and the victimization of women for profit. Running a bot net or other quasi-illegal/illegitimate operation, to gain ad revenue by selling likes/re-tweets/clicks, and gathering user-data via cookies to sell information via data-mining techniques. Pushing to close and censor the internet, and possibly connected to government agencies (for all the conspiracy theorists out there).
Registrant Name: JACOB POVOLOTSKI
Registrant Organization: SWENZY
Registrant Street: APARTAMENT NO.2, ARD CAOIN,CASTLEREA RD
Registrant Street: IRELAND
Registrant City: BALLAGHADERREEN
Registrant State/Province: ROSCOMMON
Registrant Postal Code: 12900
Registrant Country: IE
Registrant Phone: +353.833768145
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax: +1.5555555555
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email:
I suspect there to be some close connection between Rantic and Fox Weekly. This is the same gang of slimeballs who ginned up fake PR campaigns when they were calling themselves Swenzy or SocialVevo. One of the main reasons YouTube’s API has gotten more and more complicated is because these guys (and others like them) had figured out how to manipulate the old API into racking up millions of views on a video, thereby faking their way into going viral.
Excellent article. This place might eclipse ED and /pol/ as my primary news source.
Everything became topysy since last Tuesday. I’m glad not everyone has gone mad.
Nice work, gents. I’ll check in for updates.
I’d really like to know who is behind the campaign and whether it was organized for political purposes or merely elaborate trolling.
Ayy Lmao