![]() Sullivan, 37, of Portland, Ore., has been in the complaint-site business since 2008, when he started. Only two responded, and only one person consented to an interview: Cyrus Sullivan, who runs. We contacted all of the sites that copied the original posts. Note: Some identifying information and profanity have been redacted. For an image posted to, for example, we hid the domain name and the date in the file code. Each selfie included a unique watermark that allowed us to track it if it showed up somewhere new. The posts I created featured an awkward selfie and described me as a “loser who will do anything for attention.” We posted a version of the same insult on five gripe sites. And that is largely because of the secret, symbiotic relationship between those facilitating slander and those getting paid to remove it. But the problem is all the worse because it’s so hard to fix. That would be bad enough for people whose reputations have been savaged. Posts from appear in Google results alongside Facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles - or, in my case, articles in The New York Times. The unverified claims are on obscure, ridiculous-looking sites, but search engines give them a veneer of credibility. For roughly 500 of the 6,000 people we searched for, Google suggested adding the phrase “cheater” to a search of their names. One woman in Ohio was the subject of so many negative posts that Bing declared in bold at the top of her search results that she “is a liar and a cheater” - the same way it states that Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States. Sometimes search engines go a step further than simply listing links they display what they consider the most relevant phrases about whatever you’re searching for. Note: Some image results have been blurred for privacy reasons. These were the Google image results for “ aaron krolik nyc.” ![]() For more than half, the gripe sites showed up at the top of their image results. ![]() Then we set up a web crawler that searched Google and Bing for thousands of the people who had been attacked.įor about one-third of the people, the nasty posts appeared on the first pages of their results. To assess the slander’s impact, we wrote a software program to download every post from a dozen of the most active complaint sites: more than 150,000 posts about some 47,000 people. Earlier this year, we wrote about a woman in Toronto who poisoned the reputations of dozens of her perceived enemies by posting lies about them. When someone attacks you on these so-called gripe sites, the results can be devastating. They are clunky and text-heavy, as if they’re intended to be read by machines, not humans.īut do not underestimate their power. They have names like BadGirlReports.date, and. At first glance, the websites appear amateurish. ![]()
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