Something About The Timing Gives Me Pause

Over at Concurring Opinions, David Hoffman began a post about the WaPo article on Xoxohth’s “law school hotties” contest with these words:

Reputation Defender is a new start-up that seeks to commodify internet self-help. According to yesterday’s WashingtonPost article on Xoxohth, the service will destroy harmful content about you wherever it appears on the World Wide Web, presumably through an escalating series of gentle reminders followed by hard nudges against hosts. As I blogged yesterday, the site is trying to make a public good out of this private remedy by “encourag[ing] law schools to adopt a professional conduct code for students.”

As I touched on rather obliquely in this post, ReputationDefender.com is a for profit company that will benefit nicely from the above-referenced WaPo article. Every time there is a robbery in my neighborhood, I receive flyers and phone calls from home alarm companies. I don’t believe that alarm company employees are committing the robberies, but they do not hesitate to exploit them and the fear that they engender. Xoxohth is a board that encourages anonymous commenting, and while I imagine some of the commenters likely are law students, my guess is that some of them are not, and are instead people with other agendas. I make no particular accusation against ReputationDefender, as I have no evidence or reason to believe that anyone associated with this company has participated anonymously in online harassment of law students or anybody else. It is, however, hard not to see that there are financial incentives to do so.

Defamation and privacy laws as currently constituted and enforced offer little in the way of protection from online harassment, so the appeal of services such as those offered by ReputationDefender is understandable. But the examples offered by the market effects of computer anti-virus software (better software begets better viruses) and censorware software (better censorware leads to craftier censorware circumvention) suggest that all that “Internet reputation defense” companies will do is change the nature of the problem, rather than solving it, making a tidy profit in the process. It would be nice to see the government productively address the issue, but I don’t imagine that is likely to happen if the majority of people being victimized are female, and the abuse continues to be characterized as “free speech.”

–Ann Bartow

Update: Lest there be any confusion on this point, I think content posted at AutoAdmit/XOXOHTH is extremely problematic and troubling. It is, as a friend noted, “a disgusting cesspool of infantile morons, sociopaths, and misogynistic freaks.” My point is that it would be better for the government to step in than to have shady for profit”reputation defense”entities attempting to financially exploit women who are already being victimized. I am really uncomfortable with the way that a dodgy for profit entity like Reputation Defender is exploiting the situation for its own ends, like some kind of sordid protection racket – “Nice reputation you got there, shame if something happened to it.”

NB: There isn’t a single woman on Reputation Defender’s “Management Team.”