A Vast Web of Vengeance

February 1, 2021 4:34 AM

Kashmir Hill on the outrageous lies that destroyed Guy Babcock’s online reputation (NYT/Archive.is) "When he went hunting for their source, what he discovered was worse than he could have imagined."
posted by adrianhon (27 comments total)

Layers of horrible people (the person doing the attacks, the people who run scammy complaint sites to take advantage of such attacks) enabled by the overly broad CDA exemption enable this. Unfortunately, the US has enshrined the CDA in its trade deals (or, at least in the USMCA, if not deals plural), so fixing it isn't just a matter of changing legislation.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:36 AM on February 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

Why isn't this covered by libel laws? Even if that isn't applied to the platforms, it could applied to the person creating the slander.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:43 AM on February 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

People have sued her for defamation, but that doesn't get the posts taken down or stop her from doing it again. Defamation is a tort and the penalties are mostly financial and she is judgement proof.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:46 AM on February 1, 2021 [16 favorites]

This is in my top ten list of Things I Fear Because They Cannot Be Extirpated, along with bedbugs and black mold.

There really seems to be no remedy for this: none of the platform owners give a fig about removing proven-false content, even with a judge'd gavel behind it.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:50 AM on February 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

People have sued her for defamation, but that doesn't get the posts taken down or stop her from doing it again. Defamation is a tort and the penalties are mostly financial and she is judgement proof.

And this demonstrates a major flaw in Section 230 that enables all sorts of cyberharassment - a host acting in bad faith, openly attracting users looking to engage in such, then calling on 230 indemnity to kill any lawsuits against the site while making any sort of remedy against the user functionally impossible. We've seen this pattern with sites specializing with nonconsentual pornography, including the takedown shakedown.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:01 AM on February 1, 2021 [10 favorites]

There really seems to be no remedy for this: none of the platform owners give a fig about removing proven-false content, even with a judge'd gavel behind it.

Because we've said that they don't have to care, because the one thing that would make them care - actual legal penalties - have been taken off the table. The Fappening was enlightening in this regard - Reddit refused to take any action against the largest release of nonconsentual pornography online - until they were exposed to liability when a victim said that their images in the dump were taken when she was underage, at which point Reddit's position swung to "nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure."
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:14 AM on February 1, 2021 [9 favorites]

In the US harrassment is a criminal offense and a conviction can be used to restrain people from going online. Is this not possible in Canada?

The person in the Times article is lashing out so broadly that I wouldn't even feel comfortable commenting about it with a traceable account.
posted by at by at 7:27 AM on February 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

During multiple interviews in recent months, Ms. Atas refused to divulge much about herself. She told me she was worried about the impact of a New York Times article. “Anyone who Googles my name, this will come up, and I don’t want this to come up,” she said.

Oh, what a shame that would be.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 7:39 AM on February 1, 2021 [17 favorites]

In the US harrassment is a criminal offense and a conviction can be used to restrain people from going online. Is this not possible in Canada?

It might be possible to charge her criminally with harassment, but to what end? The possible outcomes from that are a fine, some type of restraining order, or jail time. Given what's in the article, it seems unlikely that a fine or restraining order would have any positive effect on her behaviour, and she's already spent time in jail for contempt of court in relation to this online harassment and it doesn't seem to have had any deterrent effect on her. I doubt that the threat of a criminal record would be much of a deterrent either for her either. Imprisoning her would prevent her from continuing to harass people online, but realistically she can't be kept in prison forever so I don't think it's a great long-term solution.

Part of what this article illustrates (to me) is that the legal system provides a fairly limited set of tools for trying to solve problems, and for people who don't care about the effects of those tools (broadly: shame, financial penalties, removal of certain privileges, and jail time) it can be difficult to use the legal system to rein in damaging behaviour. I think this is doubly the case when the behaviour is online, because it's can be practically difficult to effectively use court orders to prevent people from accessing the internet or controlling their online behaviour.
posted by persimmons at 8:48 AM on February 1, 2021 [6 favorites]

In Ontario, this woman's actions compelled the Superior Court to create a new tort this week: the tort of online harassment. Here is a blog post explaining the decision, and it contains a link to the decision itself.
posted by hepta at 9:01 AM on February 1, 2021 [15 favorites]

This looks like the Major Keyvan case all over again. Which, a cursory web search seems to indicate, is still going on over that College St condo building, some 30 years since it started.
posted by scruss at 9:16 AM on February 1, 2021

> Major Keyvan case

What is this? Stateside the only major media item I can find about it is in the Globe and Mail, and unfortunately everything except the headline is paywalled. I can infer, at least from the numerous Blogspot and LinkedIn and etc. matches is that this is somebody who's also keen on smearing people and other entities online, but of course those pages bring no useful context.
posted by at by at 10:50 AM on February 1, 2021

It might be a good sign that a (presumed) online harassment case is now hard to find online — but it would be handy to know how that could be done.
posted by clew at 10:53 AM on February 1, 2021

It might be possible to charge her criminally with harassment, but to what end? The possible outcomes from that are a fine, some type of restraining order, or jail time.

Section 230 does not apply to criminal liability, so you have more options for remedies against the host with a criminal charge.
posted by pykrete jungle at 11:57 AM on February 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

It might be a good sign that a (presumed) online harassment case is now hard to find online — but it would be handy to know how that could be done.

There are whole PR firms devoted to cleaning up online reputations by suppressing bad search results and flooding the market with wholesome, positive references to the client. Bean Dad comes to mind as a recent person to avail themselves of these sorts of services. Reply All had an episode on the topic as well.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:19 PM on February 1, 2021

Stateside the only major media item I can find about it is in the Globe and Mail, and unfortunately everything except the headline is paywalled.

Here's the article at the Wayback Machine.

The key insight from all this is one I encounter again and again: there are crazy people who have an infinite amount of time and energy and you cannot placate or work around them. When you identify them the best thing you can do is get away.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:48 PM on February 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

Section 230 does not apply to criminal liability, so you have more options for remedies against the host with a criminal charge.

What are you going to charge the host with, though? Part of the problem is that there is no federal cyberharassment statute, so there is no actual criminal liability in play. But beyond that, criminal liability is possibly applying a tool we may not want to in this case.

The article made a good point near the end:

For the last decade or so, cases like this have been written off as just what happens in the internet era. If you crossed paths with someone who tried to destroy you online, for whatever reason, you were deemed collateral damage of our modern age. People were told, basically, to shrug it off.

This has been one of the quiet shames of the Internet Age - the willingness to view the real harm these victims suffer as "the price of business". I've used the term "cheerleaders for Omelas" for this behavior, because it is basically the point of that story - turning a blind eye to suffering underpinning one's society is immoral.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:05 PM on February 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

The key insight from all this is one I encounter again and again: there are crazy people who have an infinite amount of time and energy and you cannot placate or work around them. When you identify them the best thing you can do is get away.

They aren't the problem, though. The problem are the people who would use them for their own purposes, and they can be dealt with because they have very different motivations.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:09 PM on February 1, 2021

I live near the University of Toronto and my partner totally recognizes her from around the neighborhood
posted by thecjm at 3:57 PM on February 1, 2021

I did what it suggested at the end of the article and googled him - using the link in the article, from a clean browser. Top 5 links were all to the article, then a few to other people with the same name, and only one to a smear site on the first page. So it seems he's finally rehabilitated, all it took was an NYT article. Maybe they should have named all the other victims too?
(I feel sympathy for the antagonist here - she's clearly had a hard time, and is lashing out due to underlying mental health problems and an (in the bigger picture) unfair hand she was dealt with the 2008 thing. That said, just saying 'the problem is capitalism' isn't exactly a proximal cure; I'm not sure what is.)
posted by memetoclast at 6:38 PM on February 1, 2021

I did what it suggested at the end of the article and googled him - using the link in the article, from a clean browser. Top 5 links were all to the article, then a few to other people with the same name, and only one to a smear site on the first page.

Try clicking on the 'Images' tab after you Google him, and I think you'll see why he's so upset. I see 12 photos of him littered with brightly coloured slurs and I haven't even scrolled down yet.
posted by andraste at 8:44 PM on February 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

Do people usually use image search to determine someone's reputation? Even if they do, the article is hit #4 for me in image search. I'm really not trying to say this wasn't horrible, or that the libel was in any way OK - I just tried the thing suggested and it didn't line up with the article's intent because of the article itself.
posted by memetoclast at 9:03 PM on February 1, 2021

I'm sure they don't use image search to determine someone's reputation, but I can see why he would still feel there was horrible stuff out there aimed at him. Images is often the next thing I click on after googling someone's name. Sometimes I've met or heard about someone of that name and want to make sure I've found the right person, sometimes it's to ascertain their approximate age, sometimes it's sheer curiosity.

Although you're right, the article does imply that it happens just from a basic google, and that doesn't seem to be the case. I too only got one smear site on the first page. If I were Mr Babcock, I'd feel that was one too many - but it seems unlikely that this kind of thing ever gets off the interwebs entirely once it's there.
posted by andraste at 11:19 PM on February 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

I suggest everyone change their name to something super-generic. It's the only way to be safe.
posted by mokey at 2:08 AM on February 2, 2021

That said, just saying 'the problem is capitalism' isn't exactly a proximal cure; I'm not sure what is.

The problem (at least from my perspective) is twofold:

First, there's a long running idea in our culture (amplified by the internet, yes, but also predating it) that victims of defamation are the collateral damage of free speech. For an example of this, look at the dialogue that happened around Dominion - there was quite a bit of surprise that they had actual actionable defamation claims, because it takes a lot to get a sustainable defamation claim these days, especially one where you won't get painted the villain for pursuing it. (It's also worth pointing out that while this case involved an individual who does clearly have issues underlying her behavior, most people engaging in cyberharassment know exactly what they are doing, and are targeting their victims for specific reasons.)

Two, and this is where the article sort of falls on its face, is that there has grown an entire infrastructure around enabling cyberharassment as a revenue stream (it's not by accident that the site just "happened" to have a service to remove stories - for a fee.) That is the more interesting and important part of the story - that you have this entire ecosystem built on and funded through what is ultimately a shakedown model, which is designed that you can't get out of it completely (as the article noted, the sites circulate content, which makes it impossible to remove completely.)

As such, the cure needs to address both - we need to stop treating defamation victims as collateral damage (and honestly acknowledge that words can be used to harm in general), and make the cyberharassment infrastructure no longer sustainable.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:30 AM on February 2, 2021

Adrian,

Thanks for posting; this is fascinating. I've been thinking about this on and off since I read this over the weekend and I'm truly wondering (perhaps naively) how this can be mitigated or solved...

The EU has the right to be forgotten which allows individuals to request and remove content mentioning them that's been published after X years but it's not applicable for content served outside of the EU.

As an American, I'm naive of how effective it is in the EU, perhaps that also needs to be implemented here in the US.
posted by fizzix at 2:53 PM on February 3, 2021

followup: police in toronto have arrested the woman from the story.
posted by bruceo at 5:34 PM on February 10, 2021 [3 favorites]