The site's creator earned up to $30,000 a month from the site's content, which once had around 350,000 unique users. The site was protected by the US Communications Decency Act of 1996, which states that websites are not responsible for the content posted by users. IsAnyoneUp grew in popularity, and soon the site began to contain increasingly perverse content, such as child and animal pornography.
The website was shut down in 2012. Hunter Moore received countless death threats. In 2015, Moore was found guilty of several crimes. That same year, he was sentenced to two years and six months in prison, along with a iran number data $2,000 fine. Moore was released from prison in 2017.
Alex Marengo , the documentary's producer, told Esquire that the documentary is "a crusade for justice against all odds in a world divided between real life and online depravity." The director said he was proud of the team who have "taken the spotlight off Hunter Moore, and turned his victims into the ultimate winners, giving them their voices, which have been silenced until now."
Following the closure of IsAnyoneUp, entrepreneur James McGibney took control of the website and redirected it to an anti-bullying page. McGibney wrote an open letter to Moore, stating: “Your main goal was to ‘ruin the lives of young girls.’ Even after saying they would commit suicide if the pictures, shared without their consent, were not removed from the web. You laughed in their faces.” The entrepreneur claims: “You tried to destroy their lives, but I intellectually destroyed yours. You received a master class in the fine art of social engineering.”
You can learn the whole story that inspired this documentary on Netflix