A Vast Web of Vengeance

During an interview with Ms. Atas in November, she grew angry that I planned to write this article. A week later, someone started writing posts about me and my husband on Cheaterbot, BadGirlReports and some of the other sites where Mr. Babcock and others had been targeted. The posts claimed that my husband was a drug addict and that I was a plagiarist who slept with my boss in order to get promoted. Ms. Atas said it wasn’t her.

Within a week, there were more than 100 posts about me.

After Ms. Atas talked to my editor, posts appeared about her. Ms. Atas said she hadn’t created those, either.

In an email, she warned me, “Any story in the New York Times will obviously bring out the trolls on the internet and could multiply the internet postings.”

‘Unlawful Acts of Reprisal’

On Thursday, Judge Corbett issued a ruling in the defamation suits, finding that Ms. Atas was responsible for what he called “unlawful acts of reprisal.” Ms. Atas, he wrote, is “apparently content to revel in ancient grievances, delighting in legal process and unending conflict because of the misery and expense it causes for her opponents.” He ordered Ms. Atas to stop.

But the judge left it up to the plaintiffs to try to get her slanderous posts taken down, even as he decried the free-for-all nature of online activity. “A situation that allows someone like Atas to carry on as she has, effectively unchecked for years, shows a lack of effective regulation that imperils order and the marketplace of ideas,” he wrote.

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.

Until recently, Google would remove a website from your results only if it could cause financial damage, such as by exposing your Social Security number. Now Google will remove other harmful content, including revenge porn and private medical information. At the end of 2019, it introduced a new category of information it will take out of your results: “sites with exploitative removal practices.” Google also started down-ranking some of the “complaint” sites, including Ripoff Report.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/technology/change-my-google-results.html