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Emma Watson has spoken out about hackers who threatened to release nude photos of the actress following her September 2014 gender equality speech at the United Nations.

The website emmayouarenext.com was up and running within 12 hours of her UN speech and featured a countdown to the imminent release of her naked photographs.

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“I knew it was a hoax. I knew the pictures didn’t exist,” Watson told Facebook UK in a live Q&A on International Women’s Day yesterday.

The threats were made at a time when cloud hackers were exposing nude photos of many other young female celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence and Rihanna.

The photos never surfaced and Watson took the situation in stride. She said threats came as a “wake-up call” to initial sceptics of her UN speech, to the many who believed gender equality was already achieved, or didn’t see the urgency to address the issue.

”I was raging, it made me so angry,” the British actress said in yesterday’s Facebook Q&A. “I was like, this is why I have to be doing this.”

Watson added: “If they were trying to put me off it, it did the opposite.”