(Photo: HunterMoore.TV)

Remember Hunter Moore, the 26-year-old porn proprietor whom the Village Voice wrote "makes a living screwing you?" Mr. Moore's site, Is Anyone Up, served as a platform for scorned exes and bored hackers to submit nude photos of people without their consent, along with links to their Facebook or Twitter profiles. After disappearing from the revenge porn circuit for awhile, he appears to be back in action with a new site, HunterMoore.TV.

The site is bare bones so far, with a Hunter Moore logo and two buttons, "Submit" and "Advertise." [Update: The new site will map photos to people's addresses.] A welcome message penned by Mr. Moore himself outlines what the next iteration of Is Anyone Up will look like:

My name is Hunter Moore and I created Is Anyone Up.com when I was 24 years old. I was broke and sitting on my parents couch in Sacramento, California with -$124 in my bank account. It was for me and my friends to post pictures of girls we were fucking at the time & somehow someone found it and it became what it was. I sold it because i hated what the media turned it into and it could never be what i wanted it to be and always wanted to troll the lame and boring fad that soccer moms love and thats "bullying". We had too many hackers too much overhead and way too many legal problems. This time I am doing it right. We are going to start off by launching with all the old IAU content and all new content. The submission page has only been up for five full days and we've done over 7,000 submission within that time. I am creating something that will question if you will ever want to have kids. I am making something very scary but yet fun. If you remember the old IAU you will have it back but with a mobile APP to go along with it and a very strong social networking site of our community. I hope you are all as excited as i am.

Mr. Moore rose to infamy by publishing the nude photos of others, but soon after the Voice ran its cover story on him, he turned the site over to Bullyville, an anti-bullying group. Since Is Anyone Up relied on anonymous submissions of photos, it was near-impossible to keep underage content off of the site, and Mr. Moore tweeted that he was "just done dealing with little kids getting submitted." The FBI then opened an investigation on Mr. Moore after a private investigator named Charlotte Laws discovered her daughter's computer had been hacked and nude photos posted to the site.

After turning the site over to Bullyville, Mr. Moore did seem repentant for his actions. In a note posted to Bullyville, he wrote:

I might do some writing on bullyville.com to help people who have been bullied; I've been on both sides of the fence. I am putting this message up on Bullyville.com to stand up for underage bullying. I think it's important that everyone realizes the damage that online bullying can cause.

But soon after turning Is Anyone Up over, Bullyville's founder James McGibney said he became a target of Mr. Moore's wrath. He claimed that Mr. Moore went back on his promise to speak out against underage bullying within 72 hours of turning the site over, and began harassing Mr. McGibney on Twitter, accusing him of being a pedophile. In a post published to Bullyville in August 2012, which IsAnyoneUp.com directs to, Mr. McGibney wrote:

And then came the straw that broke the camel’s back. As if accusing me of pedophilia wasn’t bad enough, Hunter Moore threatened to rape my wife while my kids watched. He has now been served with a defamation lawsuit and has restraining orders filed against him in two States.

Since then, Mr. Moore has been writing music and maintaining an active Twitter account, with over 90,000 followers.

Many people scorned by their exes breathed a sigh of relief when Is Anyone Up shut down, but HunterMoore.TV promises just as many sleepless nights and privacy fears. It will start by republishing all of the old content that populated Is Anyone Up before its shuttering.

HunterMoore.TV isn't officially launched yet, but some content is accessible via Google. One post on the new site revolves around a girl Mr. Moore met online. When he saw her at a party in New York, he was dismayed to find that she had a “man jaw.” The post is accompanied with three sexually explicit photos she sent him. Another post is about a tryst Mr. Moore had with an “elderly” woman. That page also features three nude photos.

IsAnyoneUp's Twitter account announced the new site last week, and told all of its followers to follow Mr. Moore's personal Twitter account. @IsAnyoneUp, they tweeted, was being shut down for "legal bullshitt."

Despite their signs, these people are not with Backpage. (Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

Backpage.com, owned by the Village Voice, is one of the more controversial web enterprises: according to some reports, it hosts 70 percent of the web's sex ads. On Wednesday night, there were two protests outside the Voice's offices in Cooper Square. One was led by radical feminists and evangelical Christians who compare Backpage to a pimp, hoping to shut it down the way Craigslist's "adult services section" was shut down. The other protest was led by Backpage users: escorts, dommes, and rent boys, who say shutting down the site will run them out of business or onto the streets.

Police tell members of the Sex Workers Outreach Project where they can protest. (Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

The New York chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project faced off with a coalition of anti-prostitution feminists, 33 evangelical Christian youth, their faith leaders, and a girls' theatre troupe. While the SWOP folks passed out flyers explaining the controversy to people rolling out of work early on the hottest and longest day of the year, the anti-Backpagers walked a picket line on the street just outside the doors of 36 Cooper, inside which no sex trafficking takes place, but where the Village Voice is housed.

There was also a drum circle.

It wouldn't be a protest without a drum circle. (Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

Out with the SWOP protesters was Vivian, a sex worker who's been blogging her experiences using Backpage. "Because I could work for myself and control my working conditions, I was able to screen clients for the first time," she wrote. That meant being able to avoid potentially violent customers approaching her online.

About twenty feet to her left--at least spatially, if not at all politically--the anti-Backpagers carried mini pink umbrellas from Duane Reade as they marched. Picket lines, a not entirely extinct form of protest, are most often performed by workers outside their own workplace, in solidarity with the workers inside. Not so this time. Picketers carried signs likening the Village Voice to pimps.

The marchers prefaced their "Prostitution has got to go!" chant with the unlikely "Hey, hey! Ho, ho!" a few times until a 20-something Caucasian man in a pressed shirt, who held a sheet listing the chants of the day, chimed over them with "No more selling women here, Village Voice, change your career."

(Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

Despite the words they were saying, several of the anti-Backpagers told me that they were not there in opposition to prostitution, or to adult women who work online as escorts. Some of them had also used Backpage. One was Jonathan Walton, the director of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship's New York City Urban Project, who brought out 33 members to the protest. As 20 women circled around us bearing placards demanding the abolition of Backpage, Mr. Walton told me he uses the website to create "prayer maps."

"I use these sites to figure out where the girls are for sale. We can figure out what the men are saying they want on Backpage, and then we can find the brothels by cross-referencing that with their blogs," he explained, referring to the blogs that some customers of sex workers have begun to publish. "They're all online. It's so easy."

Once a brothel (or an apartment believed to be one) has been mapped, Mr. Walton leads his youth ministry there for prayer. "We go to these places and pray. God loves the traffickers as much as he loves the exploited victim."

(Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

I noticed that the majority of anti-Backpagers on the picket were wearing yellow armbands bearing a cross with a hand on one side and a foot on the other. I asked four different people wearing them what they meant, but no one would tell me. "Have you met Jonathan?" a man who looked much older and a little less pulled together than the cleaned-up kids who were picketing. "He could tell you." He handed me a bottle of water imprinted with a heart draped in chains and the URL priceoflifenyc.org. (The website advertises a 1.2M initiative targeting 10 New York college campuses with social media and evangelism – "Stop Kony" with a sex trafficking twist.)

Our conversation was interrupted by a series of speakers. A handler identified the one with a mop of brown pretty boy curls, who called Internet pornography "a sea monster, a leviathan, that will eat our women and children alive," as "Aaron Cohen, slave hunter." Mr. Cohen traded his rock and roll lifestyle ("he used to be known as Perry Farrell's best friend and spiritual collaborator," a LA Weekly profile notes – the LA Weekly, owned by Backpage parent company Village Voice Media!) for raiding brothels in Southeast Asia.

Following Mr. Cohen came Norma Ramos, a 50-ish woman in a khaki-colored dress and wide-brimmed hat that recalled the kind of get-up I imagined Nicholas Kristof might favor while rescuing "sex slaves."  Ms. Ramos, one of the protest's lead organizers, brought up New York City Council Member Brad Lander, the co-author of a city resolution demanding the closure of Backpage. Mr. Lander recalled the contentious hearing at which Village Voice's general counsel, Liz McDougall, attempted to explain Backpage's best practices for identifying ads that might include illegal content, including references to underage persons. "She had the audacity," he told the assembled crowd, now swelled to 50, "to say that Backpage knew better, than the mayors, than all the Attorneys General."

Norma Ramos, holding a sign. (Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

One of those Attorneys General, Rob McKenna of Washington state, is the architect of policy that threatens not just Backpage, but free speech online. In an amendment to Washington State Senate Bill 6251, Mr. McKenna aimed to make Backpage illegal by criminalizing any individual or company who "knowingly publishes, disseminates, or displays, or causes directly or indirectly, to be published, disseminated, or displayed, any advertisement for a commercial sex act, which is to take place in the state of Washington and that includes the depiction of a minor."

This is where the issue transcends debates about sex; like two high-profile anti-piracy bills that were halted earlier this year, a law like this threatens to drastically change the way the Internet works. The word "indirectly" in the bill recalls the issue with the unpopular Stop Online Piracy Act–its breadth potentially guts the core protections in the Communications Decency Act, the law that prevents websites from being held liable for material posted by their users. Such a sweeping change, digital rights advocates fear, could force the entire web into the purgatory of comment-moderation.

(Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

New York City Council member Melissa Mark-Viverito, who co-sponsored the resolution to demand Backpage shut down, shrugged when I asked her what we could expect if Backpage did close. Would it be a repeat of the the Craigslist "adult services" closure, which drove so many sex ads to Backpage in the first place?

She passed me back to Mr. Lander, the resolution's other co-sponsor. "Look, sex trafficking won't end tomorrow if Backpage is shut down," he said. "But the internet, it's pretty good at expanding business. It makes it easier to buy things you might otherwise be ashamed of buying."

Mr. Lander assured me he had consulted with SWOP. "I can't imagine why they wouldn't want to set up their own website, and have their own people advertise on it."

I circled back to Vivian, who confirmed Mr. Lander had one meeting with her, but hadn't addressed SWOP's concerns. "I told him there were serious problems with the bill, that we needed to be brought into the process as the real experts on Backpage. But he said, 'this is what I believe, and this is how I'll vote.'"

In the event of a work stoppage, writers, bloggers, photographers, editors, designers, and sales staff—as well as former Voice staff members and other supporters—will be publishing an alternate website, TheRealVoice.org, where readers will find the same high-quality writing there that they currently enjoy in the paper and on Voice blogs.

The initial post already has dozens of likes and reblogs. Tumblr's built-in virality could be a huge asset for the union, as the Voice's readers stay informed about the issue and stop visiting the official website. Tumblr is popular as a brand-builder and traffic driver for media, but it also supports the local news blog network Neighborhoodr, which sells ads on its Tumblr-powered site. Maybe the Voice staffers should try to woo some of the paper's advertisers--that would put pressure on talks real quick.

Betabeat queried the Voice about its Tumblr-powered protest, curious as to how many followers the nascent blog has accrued. We'll update when they get back to us.

UPDATE: Graham Rayman, speaking on behalf of Voice employees, demurred at releasing the follower count. "We just put up the Tumblr yesterday, and the numbers are growing," he said in an email. A strike looks possible, as "negotiations continue later this afternoon. At this moment, the two sides are still pretty far apart."