Perez Hilton has made a career of posting anything and everything about celebrities and their lives. On Tuesday, he thought better of it.

Mr. Hilton helped a trove of nude celebrity photos spread like wildfire across the Internet over Labor Day weekend. The photos, which included images of the actress Jennifer Lawrence and the model Kate Upton, became available after someone — and who did it is unknown — posted the pictures to 4chan and Reddit, two hugely popular anonymous online message boards. There they quickly became trading fodder among the sites’ regulars.

On Sunday, after the photos were posted to these message boards, Google searches for the term “Jennifer Lawrence” skyrocketed, according to data from Google Trends.

The images are hardly the first nude celebrity pictures to make their way online. But their publication has touched off a larger discussion on the state of privacy and civil liberties on the Internet. Some privacy advocates are focusing on the role that big tech companies play in policing — or not policing — users who repeatedly push the boundaries of taste, or those who post controversial content like the videos of the beheadings of the journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff.