Suppose a website published hundreds of false allegations about your work, relationship and personal life. That, say, you’d had your hand in the till, were accepting bribes from clients, were abusive to an employee, had plagiarised a peer’s design. Let’s also say – if you can bear it – that the same site claimed your past was a fabrication, your kids were neglected, your marriage simply a means of acquiring a free nanny. You’d just get it taken down, yes? See your union rep and lawyer, take the website to the cleaners for libel, defamation, harassment, and see justice prevail. Good luck with that. This has been my life for the past two years, and unless I choose to spend thousands of pounds to prosecute a “dragging site” for each individual lie about me, it’ll probably be my life for the next 10.
Dragging or “trashing” sites are a relatively new kind of forum dedicated to following every move of people with a prominent online presence – bloggers, journalists, celebrities and the like – and slating who they are and whatever its (usually anonymous) users imagine they’re doing. Their existence is thinly predicated on a quest for transparency in social media coverage. This would be something if they made formal complaints involving actual evidence, thus allowing victims to properly defend themselves with documentation, but site users habitually concoct stories on a suspicion or hunch and there they stay, in the public domain, in perpetuity, regardless of the erosion to someone’s hard fought-for reputation. Once marked as a bad person, every detail of your life can be rubbished with abandon and wild assertions simply become accepted fact.
My own contingent went as far as to send their entirely unfounded allegations to a global industry gossip account which published them unchecked, albeit briefly before taking them down and issuing a half-apology. The human cost is both huge and dismissed out of hand. Several victims have posted publicly about the effects of dragging sites on their mental health. The grieving relatives of a beloved friend of mine have had the misery of reading false speculation about their daughter’s funeral. My child’s teacher read how I would sell my kids for money. I spent most of last year in depression and a colleague of mine – not in the public eye – was bullied relentlessly online to the point where she became mentally unwell.
And yet, the more unchecked hate piled on to victims, the higher the site climbs in Google results. As we’ve learned from Netflix’s Social Dilemma, abuse is great for business. The dragging platforms earn money from advertising, while victims stand a very real chance of losing their livelihoods (only last week, I spoke to one woman whose small business is on the brink of collapse after site users left fake customer reviews).
Last week, the makeup artist and new mother Katie Hayes posted a video pleading for dragging site users to leave her alone, after police had arrived at her front door in response, she alleges, to fabricated reports that she had broken lockdown. (I can relate. Someone on a dragging site suggested I’d breached lockdown in order to accept a donation to my charity from someone in New York – an extraordinary accusation perhaps based on the assumption that internet banking had yet to hit the US.) In her video, Hayes said: “I don’t know how much more I can take of this … These trolls want me to have a mental breakdown.”
During the making of the BBC Radio 4 programme, Me and My Trolls, about dragging site culture, I asked a psychologist and leading expert in cyberstalking to take a look at the site. In just a few hours, she identified incidences of hate speech, harassment and classic behaviours of stalkers and other abusers. And finally, the law may agree with her that dragging sites cross the line.
The Law Commission has recently published recommendations for an overhaul of the law surrounding online abuse. Critically, they include provisions for “pile-ons”, where a number of individuals subject someone to a sustained campaign of online behaviours that cause harm. No distinction is made between direct communications to victims and indirect communications the victim will probably hear of (the “if you don’t like it, don’t read it” argument features prominently in the self-justification of dragging site users, but is largely meaningless in law). I’ve spent the past two years wishing these trolls would have the decency to defame me privately in WhatsApp, but the Law Commission wants to include that form of bullying, too.
While the much-feted online harms bill – designed to better protect citizens from harmful online behaviours – makes its way through parliament at glacial pace (thank Covid, and the Department for Culture Media and Sport’s insistence that tech companies be consulted), I hope they’ll get there in time.
Because as trolls gaslight victims, accusing them of inventing posts they have printed out in front of them, of faking their pain and trauma for attention, none of them, seemingly, are wondering how they might feel when somebody dies. The very notion is laughably absurd to them, despite the dozens of victims in my inbox (all too frightened of the certain repercussions from contributing to the documentary) who say that they are in therapy, on medication, or experiencing depression, OCD or agoraphobia as a direct result of being victimised on dragging sites. They and their families are living a daily hell. If, as legal experts told me in interview, the “known causing of harm” is to be the threshold, then these sites may long since have dragged themselves over it.