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Social nudeworking

Is Anyone Up? is your basic for-profit revenge pornography site.

The idea is that the scorned ex can send in nude photos of his or her former lover to humiliate them. Nude shots can be submitted anonymously, but in order to get them posted, the identity of the nude, including real name and social media profile, needs to be provided.

Lowbrow content is matched by low-tech layout – photos stacked on top of each other like it’s 2006.

Is Anyone Up? recently landed in Toronto and is posting pictures of locals in birthday suits, from singers in metalcore bands to Maple Leafs players to west-end bartenders.

So how do we get this scuzzy site to go away?

Hunter Moore, its Bay Area-based founder, anticipated that question.

His defence is that the scuzziness reflects not on him but on his users. They’re the ones leaking the naked photos, after all.

When pressed, he also quotes law related to posting pornographic photos of unwilling or unaware participants.

He cites the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230, a piece of U.S. legislation that protects site owners in the case of user-submitted content.

Moore thinks he knows a bit about copyright, too, arguing that sending naked photos anywhere – to a site, to someone else – is the equivalent of sending away the copyright of that photo to the recipient, who then can post it to Is Anyone Up?.

(In Canada it’s a little bit different. There is no such decency legislation, and law here does not provide Moore that protection for user-submitted content. And photographs are subject to copyright, and it gets more complicated when they’re distributed for profit.)

Legal objections aside, the fact is, people like to take photos of themselves without clothes on and email them out all the time.

An estimated one-third of young people aged 20 to 26 have taken photos of themselves in the buff and sent them to someone else, according to the research firm TRU. That’s 36 per cent of women and 31 per cent of men.

“That’s what people want to see, and that’s what I give them,” Moore said recently on On The Media, an American public radio show.

Meanwhile, social networks are resisting this sexual humiliation business model. Not only is Moore’s site forbidden to have any sort of profile on Facebook its URL may not even appear anywhere – in a status update, message, photo, anywhere.

I asked one of Moore’s “subjects,” a young woman whose nude photo appeared on the site without her consent, how best to rid the world of Is Anyone Up? Understandably, she didn’t want to talk.

On her Twitter, though, a sad and telling message: “My life is over. I would really rather not be internet famous.”

Perhaps that’s an answer in itself. Instead of banning, ignoring or censoring Is Anyone Up?, drag it into the light and take a good look at the damage it causes. That won’t stop nude pictures from flying around the internet, but it might give pause to the scum who make money off those photos.

joshuae@nowtoronto.com | @joshuaerrett

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