The Appeal of Abuse: The Public Popularity of Online Image-based Abuse in the Early 2010s

Image-based abuse, or sometimes misleadingly referred to as revenge porn, involves the distribution of sexual images or videos of another person without their consent. This practice grew in tandem with the rise in access to the internet and other digital technologies like smart phones, which gave individuals more power to produce and share such images. The popular website Is Anyone Up? (IAU) was among the first to popularize image-based abuse in the early 2010s, becoming the heart of an online subculture built around not just the sharing of “nudes” but also the collective mocking of the people featured in those images. This article explores the popularity of this website by capturing public sentiment toward its closure on 19 April 2012. In the 12-hour period after IAU closed, 2,967 tweets referencing the website were posted on social media platform Twitter, providing the foundation for this thematic analysis. The results suggest that the image-based abuse perpetuated on IAU was fuelled by cyberanomie, wherein the rapid shift to online social interactions created a vacuum of social norms wherein image-based abuse was normalized as a means to fill periods of boredom, or alternatively as an informal control on the sending of nudes.