In 2018 Guy Babcock had his whole life and reputation destroyed. He got a phone call that day and when he ended his conversation with his father and Googled himself. He was accused of being a thief, a fraudster, and a pedophile in a plethora of bizarre website articles that appeared in the search results. The posts included Mr. Babcock’s contact information and place of employment. And to make matters worse, the offender also defamed his wife, brother, sister, brother-in-law, nephew, cousin, and aunt. Whoever was behind this went to great lengths to discredit him and everyone connected to him: the men were all pedophiles, the ladies were all thieves. Only his son, who was only eight years old, had been spared. Mr Babcock got lucky when he discovered that one of the posts contained a photo of the person who had made it. When he learned that Nadire Atas, a former employee, had worked at the real estate firm his father and he had founded in 1990, he was astounded. She had been a top performer at first, but when her performance declined, Mr. Babcock’s father sacked her. She unfortunately represents an extreme case (and is suffering from mental health problems, according to her family). However, it does draw attention to the issue of website owners avoiding responsibility and taking action for these kinds of attacks by using the Communications Decency Act’s “safe harbor” provisions. Companies that provide reputation management services have been established to address this issue, and it is telling that, in many cases, their only effective response is to generate enough positive content for other websites to push the defamatory content down in the search results so that it is not visible. A revision in the legislation regarding the accountability of websites for content put on their websites has been demanded by many. Recent political events also imply that the freedom to blatantly lie and publish incorrect material online should be subject to some sort of regulation; after all, it would be in any other means of communication, so why should the internet be exempt?
Sources
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/technology/change-my-google-results.html
