Did you hear the one about how 4chan users, enraged to the point of madness after Emma Watson's pro-feminism speech to the UN, have threatened to unleash the Harry Potter star's hacked nudes to the internet in retaliation? If you have, it's probably because you spent some amount of time yesterday or today on the internet. But now that they're taking heat for it, they're claiming they have nothing to do with it.
4chan has spent years honing a much-deserved reputation as a place for trolls to gather and squeeze each other's pimples. They're behind mocking the families of bullied kids who commit suicide, hacking Sarah Palin's email, making the Nazi swastika symbol trend on the US homepage of Google, and, most recently, being the first public internet home for stolen celebrity nude photos. They've "raided" Tumblr with images of gore, and even flooded this very website's comment sections with gifs of rape porn and violence (hello, /pol/!).
But this time nobody is taking credit for the existence of the emmayouarenext dot com website that contains a clock that is currently counting down the hours until the supposed release of Emma's nudes (originally, their release was scheduled for Friday, but now they clock promises to run out at midnight tonight). In fact, one poster on /pol/ clarified today that 4chan in fact thinks Emma Watson is rad and would never do something like that to her.
"I know there are several journalists lurking /pol/ - so I just want to say, when these Emma Watson nudes come out, IT IS NOT 4CHAN. This is a false flag by /whichever agency/, probably NSA or something.
4chan holds Emma in high esteem, and while most of us would fap like crazy to real nudes, it's not us hacking the cloud.
Thanks for listening. Oh, if by some rare fluke Emma Watson is reading this - many on 4chan respect what you're doing as a moderate, balanced feminist and we don't hate you like we hate the SJW's"
Other users have interesting theories as to who is behind the leak beyond "the NSA."
I can't believe I'm about to defend 4chan, but here we go: despite the presence of 4chan's logo on the Emma You Are Next site, and the fact that some on the site's /b/ message board say they are aboard, it seems like no one has been able to prove definitively that they person behind the website even has the nudes, or that they originated at 4chan.
In the coverage of Watson's speech, one person extrapolated from the correlation between Watson's pro-feminism speech to the UN and the launch of the website (Watson gave her speech on Saturday; the countdown clock appeared on Sunday) that they were related to another and everybody else just ran that peg all the way to the end zone. Some commenters in the thread quoted by Death & Taxes seem gleeful about the correlation, but that doesn't mean that one event was prompted by the other.
Lower your hackles. This is the reaction that gives internet trolls life.
Besides, it's probably all just bullshit, anyway.