Emma Watson Nude Photo Leak Just A PR Stunt?
On September 21, Emma Watson stood before an audience at the United Nations Headquarters in New York and delivered a powerful speech on the issues of gender discrimination to both men and women, encouraging males to stand for the gender rights. The next day, Watson was hit with threats from anonymous individuals to leak her intimate nudes.
A website was solely set up with a countdown clock in anticipation of the presumed nude photos. Users on the 4chan message board took credit for creating the site, which featured the 4chan logo. Within 24 hours, Emma Watson stood before an audience armed with a speech and a campaign to fight for gender equality. At the same time, she was conceivably facing the potential of being sexually attacked and humiliated by heinous individuals.
Or maybe not.
It appears that the heinous individuals threatening Emma Watson are actually a marketing company called Rantic Marketing, and their agenda is even more surprising.
It appears that the marketing company piggybacked on Emma Watson in order to bring awareness to the effort of internet censorship and to bring an end of 4chan. The website that featured Emma’s face and a countdown clock had been replaced with Rantic’s own homepage at midnight on September 24.
Rantic’s homepage presented an open letter addressed to President Barack Obama. The letter claims that the company had been “hired by celebrity publicists to bring this disgusting issue to attention.”
There is no confirmation of whether the company used Emma Watson’s well-received speech at the UN headquarters as a strategy. There is also no confirmation that Watson had a direct role in the creation of the stunt. However, we can agree that it was at least very good timing.
Watson had been vocal on the issue about the recent hacking of intimate images from celebrities. Earlier in September, Watson tweeted her concern of the “lack of empathy” shown to the victims of the photo hacking incident.
Even worse than seeing women’s privacy violated on social media is reading the accompanying comments that show such a lack of empathy.
— Emma Watson (@EmWatson) September 1, 2014
Watson made no comment on the issue whatsoever, and has been heavily promoting her HeforShe campaign. The campaign encourages men to participate more in gender equality issues. Emma Watson’s campaign has received support from many male celebrities such as Simon Pegg, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and James Van Der Beek.
[Image via Flickr]
