A trip inside the world of online reputation rehab

Jordan I sincerely hope that you never have the problem we’re discussing today. Not only because I’d like to thank all our listeners are good people who would never do anything to destroy their own Google results. But also because that kind of problem happens to perfectly normal people who have done nothing wrong, and the results can be disastrous. It won’t shock anyone to learn how badly a negative reputation online can impact your real-world prospects. That was clear like a decade ago. What might surprise you though, is the rabbit hole you can fall down when attempting to either clear your name from an online attack, or even to remove legitimate information about you. In this world, there are angels and devils. Some companies have a stated mission to help those who have been unfairly wronged online rehabilitate their reputations.

Other companies in the business have less of a pure approach. And they exist as part of a vicious cycle that can both trap people in a world that leaves them powerless and broke and can make a ton of revenue in the process. Whether you live a perfectly virtuous life or not, you should listen to the difference between them. Because you might need the services one day, we all might welcome to the world of online reputation management.

I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is the big story. Paul Gallant is a Toronto-based writer who covers business travel, culture and society. He wrote this story for the Walrus. Hey, Paul.

Paul Gallant Good morning.

Jordan My first question for you is just can you tell me about Matt Earle, who I guess is from Toronto on his company? reputation.ca. What do they do?

Paul Gallant They were one of the first companies that came across when I started working on the story. Matt Earle has a company that does reputation management online. Now that sounds like it might be simple, but it’s actually very complicated. Because there’s many ways that one’s reputation can be affected online. So they would have strategies to address issues with your reputation on everything from mainstream media, you know, legacy media, to blogs, to review websites, to websites that exist in the world that are kind of mostly dedicated to defaming people. So they would have a variety of approaches to each of these kind of different types of online publication to kind of clean up your reputation to try to encourage good things being said or being reported about you and to kind of play down or perhaps eliminate the bad things being said about you and your business.

Jordan Can you maybe give us some practical examples of work they’ve done? You know, how varied? Is it? And how prominent are some of their clients? I guess I’m trying to get a sense of who this service is for?

Paul Gallant Well, I would say I mean, because obviously, the clients who are going to reputation management companies are concerned about the reputation. So the reputation management companies aren’t going to tell any details about them. Right. These are clients who usually want to have a low profile. I would say it’s not a cheap service to get. So it’s mostly companies or you know, well-known people who, whose reputation is worth a lot to them. It could be you know, big, big companies up and coming companies, well, well-known people who will pay good money to make sure they have a good reputation. But also it can be people who are defamed online or who feel they’re defamed online, who just are very emotionally invested in that bad thing is there about them, so they might be prepared to spend a lot of money to get rid of that bad thing. It’s not cheap, though.

Jordan Well, that was my next question is just, you know, how much do they charge? And I guess this might cover a lot of ground, but But what kind of services specifically do they perform to achieve what they promise?

Paul Gallant Well, Matt Earle says, their campaigns can cost between 10 and $20,000. But running kind of over several months. It’s very complicated industry. So it kind of depends what you’re looking for and what what kinds of websites or you’re wrangling with, if we talked about legacy media, if if somebody feels they’ve been defamed or has this there’s something reported about something they want to see in legacy media like a newspaper, mainstream broadcaster, right. The company might you know, Try to fact-check what was published presents the publisher with other information that would kind of lead the publisher to make a correction or remove information, lobby the editor to kind of do something about the story. Usually, legacy media, mainstream media won’t take down a story. So it’s kind of using research skills and kind of persuasion to get them to author it or do something to it. websites that are kind of more blog-based or like, you know, smaller operations that may not have ethical rules that a mainstream newspaper or other publication might have, you know, it might be, you know, literally bullying them, and just saying, Please take this down, or we’re gonna sue you, or this is going to happen to you. For other websites, you know, that’s might actually be defaming, or saying bad things about people for profit. So sometimes some publications, you have to go to them and offer the money to have them take down or change material, right, there’s the other aspect of it is search engine optimization, which is very technical. But it kind of means putting lots of good things out there. So the bad results, or the unwanted results aren’t as obvious. And then they’ll come up in search results. And there’s lots of kind of backend tinkering and complain with the algorithms of Google and other search engines that are often proprietary so that reputation managers don’t want to talk about them. But it kind of allows them to make sure unwanted results if they can’t be disappeared, don’t surface so easily.

Jordan I want to ask you about something you just mentioned, which are some of the sites that have kind of online defamation for lack of a better term, or at least online tattling as, as their business model, you mentioned, a site in your piece called the dirty Could you maybe explain it, I’m just I want our readers to get a sense of what kind of beyond legacy media and blogs, what kind of sites are out there that can harm reputations online.

Paul Gallant But I think that was the thing that was most surprising to me when I started working on the story. Because when my editor and I started talking about it, I think we both kind of thought of these organizations is kind of like, well, how do they make the Globe and Mail take down a story or change a story, I guess that’s original framing was kind of that, right? And what kind of skills is it take to get, you know, the globe to change something or take down something. But then as you kind of start to go down the rabbit hole, then you see there’s lots of smaller publications that can be kind of bullied or persuaded.

And then you see that there’s an array of publications online that are kind of almost devoted to publishing unflattering material, kind of creating a system either to have themselves pay directly to have that material removed, or suppressed or controlled, or to kind of through intermediaries kind of channel money, or, you know, advertising their way. Because of that unwanted content. So the dirty, which you just mentioned, is one of the most kind of well-known ones kind of looks like a celebrity gossip website. It’s kind of all pink and kind of colorful, and kind of done up like a celebrity blog. But what they do is they encourage users to post things about, you know, people are upset with usually, and it’s usually tremendously unflattering. And because it’s being posted by anonymous users that dirty doesn’t really take responsibility for what’s been published, they don’t fact check. They have a few simple rules about you know, child pornography, or threats. But aside from that, it’s kind of anything goes. So you know, you’ll see a lot of material about I mean, aggrieved ex-lovers are seem to be a very big category of people using these sites. And they will post you know, he was a bad father and he had these sexually transmitted diseases and she was very promiscuous, I’m using gentle are terms that usually shows up in these websites. So often, that material that was posted to you, it’d be very triggering, right? And you’ll be desperate to not have that information about you. And these sites are kind of exploiting that, having this material published, and then maybe they will take money themselves or, you know, work with a third party to have that material removed. It’s hard to see the exact motivations because of course they’re being very mysterious about it. Nobody wants to say they’re purposely committing extortion or so that it’s it’s quite shady you know, how the relationship between these websites some of the companies that promised to take down the information on these websites and the people who are posting the information.

Jordan Yeah, you kind of described you know, a self-fulfilling prophecy almost where you know, the the reputation damage happens and the companies who purport to eliminate it are almost working and I’m not trying to put words I’d love to hear you explain it, but or almost go hand in hand with the companies that promised to remove it. And, and to me that sounds like a shakedown.

Paul Gallant I mean, definitely. I mean, I think, for example, Matt Earle’s company, I mean, he’s not, I’m pretty confident from talking to him. He’s not complicit with sites that kind of purposely try to upset people. But you know, he will go to them and say, What do I need to do to have this removed? You can see that there’s other kind of rapid reputation fixers and kind of law firms who advertise on these web sites who kind of have the link connections to them. And one might presume that there’s kind of a deal happening that kind of has this the site on one hand, kind of put up embarrassing material and, and then somebody else offers a remedy. And you can kind of see in the links, connections between them. But you know, it’s hard to say what exactly those connections are, how formal the relationships are, you know, what kind of cash might pass hands, it’s hard to say, nobody’s going to come out and say, Yes, this organization is actually part of our own organization, that’s not possible.

Jordan When you’re reporting on this stuff, and asking these kinds of organizations, these kinds of questions, Did you worry about your own online reputation?

Paul Gallant I did. It’s funny what I was Googling, Googling lawyers, and other experts who could look in this field and, and work in it, you know, very, very well known trial lawyers, you google them, and you get results if they’re a terrorist, or that they’re, you know, a pedophile is a very common insult that’s kind of thrown around. So you can see that the people who are poking their nose in this business are often targeted, I guess, as a way to discourage them. So I was worried that he had been worried about it. I haven’t encountered any issues yet. Knock on wood.

Jordan Do we have any idea and this is what kind of fascinates me about this piece is trying to determine the difference between, you know, a, a bad actor that is paying a company to bump down results that are true about bad things they did when you’re talking about, you know, potential crime reported by legacy media or whatever, versus people who are essentially stuck in a position of, of being slandered online by either a jilted ex-lover or someone else and, and need to pay to remove false content?

Paul Gallant They’re, I would say, very hard to say. I mean, especially on the the sleazier side of the industry, it’s very hard to know what even the relationships between the various parties are one of the funny things going into the story, I was like, Okay, well, I want to talk to people who feel they’ve been defamed online and see how how they feel and how they dealt with it. Now, tell me if you’ve been called a pedophile online, are you interested in talking to reporter, you’re not. So the the the consumers in this industry, you’re usually kind of feeling some feeling of shame or embarrassment, or, or at least want to get control of their online reputation in a way that they don’t want publicity, you know, their ultimate goal is to not talk about it. So it’s very hard to get a sense of who’s doing what, who wants what I mean, that’s why I think I mentioned that piece. There’s a case of Brandon Rook, which is one of the few Canadian court cases about it. Brandon didn’t return my calls to be interviewed, but at least I could talk about his court case, because that’s in the public record. That kind of gives you a bit of a sense of how hard it is to determine what is happening. Who are these customers and what they end up going through?

Jordan Can you maybe quickly explain what happened to Brandon and what happened in court? Because my next question for you anyway, was going to be about, you know, what happens when this stuff actually enters the legal realm?

Paul Gallant I mean, I think the thing is, the stories is also kind of getting in how this industry has sprung up, partly because the law really fails to to help people in these kind of situations. And it’s very hard to get people to talk about it. So I went looking through court cases and did find the case of Brandon Rook, who was a Vancouver-based geologist and business consultants. And one of his exes had sour feelings towards them that went online and posted, you know, almost 100 social media posts on sites like the dirty which we’ve mentioned, cheaters or slept report, and posted tremendous amount of embarrassing material, whether true or not, it was certainly embarrassing and written with a vindictive tone, let’s say Brandon Rook was one of the few people who you know, took took that person to court and was able to create evidence because that’s the other trick about online defamation or online. embarrassment. Sometimes it’s very hard to pinpoint who, who said it, who posted it. He was able to actually form a connection between this material and his ex-wife, and was able to say, yes, she was directly responsible for posting this material. And she did it out of malice. The court awarded Rook for 200,000 bucks in damages plus costs. But that wasn’t you know, before he had already gone to an online reputation management company and spent a tremendous amount of money trying to get that material move before he ended up in courts.

Jordan How is it possible for these companies like reputation.ca, or any of them, because I’m not trying to pick on any one of them to provide what seems you know, based on based on this discussion, like unnecessary service, without, you know, actively disappearing things that do deserve to be public, you know, some of this is, is people like Brandon, that you described, but others are businesses who have done some shady stuff that that want to make it go away.

Paul Gallant I mean, I think that’s where the fact that this has become an industry rather than become a legal problem that can be dealt with in the court is a real problem. Because if you’re paying companies to disappear or suppress this material, the companies taking your money, don’t really care whether it’s true or false, useful to the public good or not, right? That’s, that’s not really a factor. The factor is how much are you paying them? What methods can they suppress? Or, or, or eliminate the material by right? So truth, truth is not really irrelevant when it’s run as an industry. You know, the law, the legal system care cares about truth. But the legal system so far hasn’t really been an effective way to deal with this material.

Jordan What did you learn then, in the course of your reporting, about how people can protect themselves from this kind of stuff being done to them online, if the legal system is not a great recourse, and most people to be frank don’t have 10 to $20,000 for reputation rehab?

Paul Gallant Well, I mean, definitely some, some embarrassing things that are said about us online are true, you know, if you commit a crime, and it’s reported, that’s true. And perhaps it’s in the public’s best interest that that be out there, no matter how embarrassing it is to you. So I mean, you know, I guess I’m the first, the first piece of advice I would give people is, don’t break the law and do embarrassing things.

Jordan Don’t do crimes.

Paul Gallant On the other side of things, you know, if it’s a jilted ex-lover, who wants to humiliate you, or you know, former employee who has really bad feelings about you, and wants to punish you, except for, you know, maintaining positive relationships with everybody at all times, all times in your life, there’s, there’s nothing really you can do to stop those people. And ultimately, it’s very hard to get that material removed or suppress once once they do it. I think one of the questions that had been mentioned, as I was going into this is, you know, whether what a person should do with their own online life, you know, because kind of person, you know, I guess some people kind of feel like, Oh, I just don’t want to have an online presence at all, a lot of online reputation managers would suggest that that’s a bad idea. Because having some of your own controlled material online is a good way to kind of drown out any bad material that might be out there about you. So you know, if you’re really concerned about these things, it’s good to have you know, a Facebook profile, have a Twitter account, even if you don’t use them a lot, or don’t say very much you have them, you take up that space that stops somebody from stepping into that space for you and saying, using your name as a Twitter account, that’s gonna say embarrassing things, right. So occupying that space, before anybody else can occupy it, and having venues where neutral are good things about you can can appear is a good way to suppress or drown out the bad things.

Jordan Paul, thank you so much for this and stay safe out there online.

Paul Gallant All right, thank you very much.

Jordan Paul Gallant, Writing in The Walrus, that was the big story. For more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca.Find us on Twitter @TheBigStoryFPN talk to us anytime via email, click here!. You can find this podcast in any podcast player, whichever one you prefer, Apple, Google Stitcher, Spotify pod track good pods. I’m running out of ones to name in this segment. So I will dig down to the bottom of the list and find some new ones for you to try next week thanks for listening I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings we’ll talk on Monday