Reply All - #18 Silence And Respect

Episode Date: March 29, 2015

In 2012, a woman named Lindsey Stone posted a picture she took as a joke to her Facebook page. A month later, she was under attack from all corners of the internet, out of a job, hounded by the press. The internet had targeted her for a public shaming. Jon Ronson, journalist and author of the new book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed", walks us through Lindsey's story and introduces us to the sometimes sketchy world of online reputation management. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before we get started, a quick warning that this episode has some pretty disturbing language in it. All right, let's go. From Gimlet, this is Reply All. Show About the Internet. I'm Alex Goldman. When did you first see the John Ronson spam bot? Well, I accidentally typed my name into Google and discovered this other John Ronson with my face and my name, John underscore Ronson, on Twitter.

And as I stared and surprised at, it's timeline. He tweeted, going home, got to get the recipe of a huge plate of guarana and muscle in a bap with mayonnaise, hashtag yummy. So I was like, who are you? And it was like, watching Seinfeld would love a delicious sour cream kebab with chives, hashtag foodie. John Ronson's a journalist, filmmaker, documentarian, he wrote a movie, he's written a couple of books that were bestsellers. He's not Kardashian famous, but people know who he is. And people follow him on Twitter. And now there was this Twitter bot impersonating him.

Saying things like, I am dreaming something about time and cock. So, and it was being followed by people that I knew from real life. Who suddenly wondering, why has John Ronson become so candid about dreaming about cock? John was pissed. It wasn't unreasonable that someone might confuse this bot for the, the real John Ronson. So he decided to find out what this thing was and who was behind it. Who were they?

Academics and intellectuals. There was three of them. And they decided for some academic exercise to create this John Ronson spam butt. They called it an infomorph. They wouldn't take down the spam butt, but they agreed to meet me. They said I could film their encounter and put it on YouTube. The video is pretty awkward. Three white guys in their 20s or 30s squeezed together. on this tiny couch, and John Ronson's asking them questions from off-camera. It starts off with them complaining about the way that John has arranged them on the couch. Why are you concerned about the setup of the three of you in the row? The same thing you're concerned about. Control.

What's your mean? Control of the environment. It's about psychological control, isn't it? A lot of the video is just John asking different versions of, why are you guys doing this to me? And them just sort of avoiding the answer. Well, perhaps we should go back to how John's school, Ronson, created. It's actually coming from the Wikipedia page. It's taken the sum total, everybody else has written about you on Wikipedia, and turn that into a personality.

They said the other day, thinking about time and cock. Do you ever think about time and cock? Yeah. Do I, what? You said yes. No, of course I don't think about time and cock. You're pretty unhappy with the... Yeah, because it had taken my identity. And they told me that it wasn't taking my identity. it was repurposing social media data into an infomorphic aesthetic.

The point is, you're using my name and my photograph to blar on about wasabi dumplings. Oh, we're not doing it. It's doing it. So that's going to give you a tightness in your chest. And they said that they were annoyed with me because what right did I have to be the only John Ronson?

They sound kind of like assholes. Yeah, they were assholes. But then I posted the video on YouTube and I was expecting people to be mocking me because I'd been so screechy but like everyone was on my side everybody

and it went from you know this is outrageous you know these people you know are stealing this person's identity and then laughing at the victims hurt and anger within a few minutes that had gone to break them

destroy them. That went to the fucking psychopaths. And that went to gas the cunts. So it went from naught to 100 miles an hour in like seconds.

That's awful. I know, terrible. And I went from being like thrilled that everyone was on my side to feeling like, you know, like we were just toddlers crawling towards a gun. The reaction to the video

John posted was so uniformly vicious that the three academics stopped updating the SpamBot's Twitter feed. But John was so spooked by that very viciousness, viciousness that it first scanned his righteousness, that it sent him down a rabbit hole into the world of online public shaming. And he didn't have to look far to find public shamings that literally ruined lives. He actually wrote a book about it, which comes out this week called So You've Been Publicly Shamed,

which is full of case studies about online shaming, but none so heartbreaking as Lindsay Stones. Okay, roll his beat. No pressure, no pressure. That's Lindsay Stone in an interview that John did for BBC television. So what was your job back then? I worked at, oh, here we go with the arms. You couldn't hope for a better human being, works with adults with learning difficulties.

Lindsay worked for a Cape Cod-based non-profit called Living Independently Forever, and people regularly told her that she had a special knack for working with this population. I was in charge of the Friday night activities, so we would do karaoke, dances. We would take them to baseball games when we could at Fenway, just anything special that we could do for them. People really liked her and Jamie where they were working. Jamie was Lindsay's best friend at work, and she played a small but important role in this story, because, you see, she and Lindsay, they had this running joke. Of like posing in front of signs and doing the opposite of what's happening in the same.

sign. One of our dreams was a sign outside of CVS. It said no skateboarding, no rollerblading, no loitering. And it was all on this one sign. And it was our dream to take a picture, doing all of those things under that sign. It was just this dumb, goofy thing they did occasionally. One day in 2012, Lindsay and Jamie took their clients on a trip to Washington, D.C. So what did you do? We saw, we went, we went everywhere, I feel like. We went to the JFK Museum. We toured the National Mall, the Smithsonian, in Arlington National Cemetery. We had just seen the tomb of the unknown soldier.

And so we first saw a sign that said, keep off the grass. But we didn't want to get in trouble, so we didn't take that picture. So instead, she sees a sign that says silence and respect. And we thought it might be funny to us to take a picture mocking the sign and doing the opposite of appearing silent and respectful. The picture, taken by Jamie, is Lindsay crouching next to the silence and respect sign. Her hand cupped to her mouth like she's yelling.

And she's flipping the bird. She has sunglasses on and she's smiling, clearly proud of herself. Now remember, this is just one in a series of similar pictures that she and Jamie had made. it didn't seem all that significant. Just a dumb joke. Jamie uploaded it to Facebook, tagged Lindsay in it. It just sat there and no one cared about it.

And then a month later, doing a restaurant. I remember it was a Monday night and we were celebrating Jamie's birthday and mine. We're a few days apart. And so we were out for dinner, and all of a sudden, both of our phones start vibrating like crazy.

We just kind of put our phones on silent and one about the dinner. And then I remember in the car ride on the way home, I finally got a chance to check my email. And there was an email from the director of our program saying, do you know anything about this? And it was the picture of me. Someone, and to this day she has no idea who,

took the photo from Jamie's Facebook page and sent it to a pro-military website. It didn't take long for her life to unravel. That same day, someone set up a Facebook group called Fire Lindsay Stone. Seeing it grow from the time we had gotten back from dinner until the time I finally went to bed was insane. I think it was already like 10,000 people.

Did you read the comments about you? Oh, yeah. No, no, yeah, I was up all night. I was up until like 5 in the morning. Her address and phone number found their way online, as they have a habit of doing in scenarios like these. TV crews started showing up at her door, and her phone rang nonstop.

Can you remember, like, specific phrases of people use it? I don't, it's not appropriate to repeat on television. Since we're not on television, John repeated them for me, but a warning. Even though we had a language disclaimer up top, this stuff is pretty disturbing. Well, as always, like, within minutes, it goes from, you know, I'm so saddened by this disrespectful photograph to die, cunt, cut out her uterus, raper. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah.

Soon, there weren't just Facebook groups like Fire Lindsay Stone. There were groups with names like Set Fire to Lindsay Stone. Lindsay, like everyone, had a social life and friends, hopes, dreams, a job. But to the world, she'd been reduced to a single moment. This photograph. Soon after all this blew up, she and Jamie were fired. Lindsay was living with her parents, and she stopped leaving her house. She spent days without sleeping.

And against her better judgment, All she wanted to do was see what people were saying about her on the internet. For a while, I got sucked into that routine of wanting to check up on myself and see what people were saying. And it became sort of like an obsession, unfortunately. But yeah, there were quite a few nights where it was hard to sleep. And even when I wasn't online checking up on myself, just thinking, you know, worrying about what direction my life was going to take if I would ever have a job opportunity, if I would ever be able to move forward.

Yeah. You know. It took a long time, but eventually she got a job she wanted, working with children with autism. But she didn't tell her new bosses about the photo. And then she worried all the time about being found out, especially when people said nice things to her. Like when the mother of one of the kids told her she was made for this work.

I never thought I would hear those words ever again. You know what I mean? I never thought I would work in that field ever again. And to have someone say to me that you were made for this. I can tell. What if you see this picture and you don't feel the same way about this girl in the picture, you know,

that is also me. And it was terrifying the whole time, honestly. So when you heard her story, you reached out to her, how long did it take for her to get back to you? Months. I sent her this incredibly passionate letter saying I'm completely on your side. I think what's happened to you is terrible.

And she completely ignored my letter. And then a couple of months later, I wrote back to her and I said, look, I'm really sorry for persevering, but I really want to do this. You know, I feel like I have to tell your story. And this book could be a bit of a game changer. You know, people take my book seriously. And she ignored my second letter.

So then another couple of months passed, and I wrote her again. And I said, look, you know, please don't think I'm stalking you, but I've got an incentive now. And the incentive is that there's this company who want to offer you hundreds of thousands of dollars of free service to scrub that photograph off the internet. When we come back, what it takes to clean up your online reputation after thousands of people have dragged it through the mud. And now back to the show. Before the break, John told us he'd finally gotten Lindsay to talk by dangling this giant carrot. He'd help her get her life back by enlisting the services of a company that could disappear this whole terrible chapter.

The company's called Reputation.com, and this is their CEO, Michael Fertick. John, which is on Twitter, which I've come to understand is pretty much, you know, how he operates in a real-life example of how someone could help. That's what Reputation.com does. they change their client's Google search results. That might seem impossible or it might seem sacrilegious because, of course, for a lot of people, Google is this monolithic public resource or maybe even like the definitive index of reality itself.

But Michael disagrees. The biggest myth of order of things of how Google presents stuff, that is inevitable, inexorable, and correct, whatever flows the top of Google deserves to be there. Michael thinks that, as a rule of thumb, Google can work great, but only when you're talking about people

or subjects that have been discussed over a long period of time by many, many people. George Bush, Barack Obama, cancer, climate change, Google probably does a pretty good job. For almost every topic under the sun, that is not true. So for Lindsay, someone with almost no online presence, one little mistake defined her. Michael was really drawn to Lindsay's story. It's not a celebrity. It's just a citizen, you know, silly, but it's the, it's the level of silliness that probably every one of us has, has engaged in. So Reputation.com agreed to take on Lindsay's case pro bono, which is huge, because normally

a case like this would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It seems crazy, but it turns out that rewriting someone's online history is a ridiculously complex process. I had an online reputation manager. I could call him, text him, email him any all hours of the day and night. Like, he spent a lot of time interviewing me and getting to know my life. likes and dislikes. So Lindsay's reputation manager had to learn everything about her. All the things you don't get from a Google search. Because when you're trying to repair a person's online reputation,

you aren't deleting bad stuff off the internet. You're burying it under a pile of neutral or even good information. For example, there's this. At the bottom of the first page is the Lindsayamstone.com promoting autism awareness website. And I just want to read the first paragraph of this. It says, Lindsay Stone's website, welcome. On this website, you'll find a wide range of information on autism spectrum disorders.

My goal is to promote awareness of autism spectrum disorders and support the research and outreach efforts. This goes on for a while. This is a website that Reputation.com built for Lindsay Stone. She didn't put this up on her own. And it's not the only website that they built for her. There was the Travels Through North America blog, Lindsay Stone's favorite books and movies blog, a website about music, her love for Iggy is a. her resume.

They would generate this content for me. Like, they would create blogs and posts and social media to try to bolster my online presence because I didn't really have one, you know. And lots of photographs of you doing that kind of normal, nice things and not. Yeah, I sent them a lot of photographs of, like, me on trips and just things, like doing normal things. They take all these sites and link them to one another, all in an attempt to manipulate the Google algorithm. Because with Google, the more people who link to these pages, the higher they appear in the

search returns. And the idea is for them to get high page ranks and will push the negative judgments down to like page two or page three of Google, which is where only crazy people look. Right. I can count myself among those crazy people. I also consider myself one of those crazy people. The Fire Lindsay Stone page, the other mean stuff. It started dropping. when you searched her name. So all these new, bland, innocuous Lindsay Stone pages linked together, they started to create a smokescreen, a haze under which Lindsay's one stupid mistake began to disappear.

So how successful was Reputation.com with Lindsay Stone? I'd say, I mean, they said to me, this is the hardest job we have ever taken on. So they knew that, you know, it was tough. I'm going to go ahead and do a Google source. search on Lindsay Stone right now while I've got you here. It's got a little bit worse because my books just come out. Right.

One of the things that I noticed was there are stories that relate to the photograph on the first page, but stories that are in her defense tend to be up at the top. There was discussions actually between Reputation.com and Lindsay about that. Like they said to Lindsay, look, how would you feel if we try and leave up there, those kinds of articles. I think even Gorka wrote a pro-Lindsay article saying, you know, happy now this good employee's been fired over a joke. And I think Lindsay was like, sure.

So the photograph is still there, but it's now interspersed with lots and lots and lots of other photographs of Lindsay doing other things than flipping off military cemeteries. When you search Lindsay Stone on Google today, the Fire Lindsay Stone Facebook page is nowhere to be found. But another Facebook page called Higher Lindsay Stone is the second result. So after many months of work, Lindsay got her life back, which is great. But what if it's not a lovable caretaker of disabled children that wants their reputation cleaned up? John told me the story of a guy named Phineas Uppam, who was arrested along with his mother on tax evasion charges in 2010.

They'd tried to hide $11 million from the American government and sneak the cash back into America. This came and went very quickly. Finius' mother pled guilty, and she was finesse's mother pled guilty, and she was finesse. And then Phineas, all the charges were dropped. And then that was it. It was over. And for a while, that was the main thing on Google about Phineas upham.

But then something odd started happening. And John learned about all this from a fellow journalist, a guy named Graham Wood. Graham had gone to school with Phineas, and so he'd been following the case pretty closely. Graham never bothered to cancel his Google News Alert, and that's how he began to notice that Phineas Uppin was getting all these really weird accolades. So like he was appointed head finance curator of Venture Cap Monthly, whatever that meant. and something called Charity News Forum voted in Philanthropist of the Month

and he started writing for a magazine called Philanthropy Chronicle and he published a collection of essays so suddenly Phiddea Settlement become this sort of glorious human so Graham felt a bit suspicious and started looking at all of these accolades and saw that the websites

where these accolades were appearing were all very flimsy they look kind of amateurish and kind of temporary and it was like nothing past the first page. And so he went to the address of the philanthropy chronicle and discovered that philanthropy chronicle didn't exist. Phineas had paid this mysterious company called Metal Rabbit,

some presumably great sum of money, to make up shit about him online. To be clear, Michael Fertick and Reputation.com will not make stuff up in order to improve a client standing on the internet. And also, unlike a lot of shadier reputation management companies, they don't work with convicted felons or fraudsters or sex offenders. But all the same, out of their 2 million clients, 2 million, you've got to figure there may be a handful as wholesome as Lindsay Stone. Maybe this is like asking a defense lawyer how many of their clients they think are guilty, but do you feel as personally bad for most of your clients as you do for Lindsay Stone? For a lot of them, yeah, it says, hey, if someone's saying really nasty things about you,

you know, it must be true. And as in all things, there's usually a grain of truth, right? Lindsay Stone did take the photograph, which is him. She did pose for it, right? But the response was just so overboard. It was just so destructive to a human being with real flesh and blood, right? I have not had the fortune of reviewing our individual customers for some years, but I used to look at a lot of our stuff.

And I was always amazed at how underneath the hood, almost nobody's Voldemort, even though the Internet might think that they are. So that's the world we live in now. If the Internet thinks are Voldemort, it costs a ton of money to fix it. And unfortunately, the Internet is on a perpetual hunt for new Voldemort's. And a lot of the time, the people cast in the role of Baltimore don't have that money. One way to think of the Internet is as a great flattening. Everyone's part of the media, and everyone's a potential celebrity.

You know, I had a big lesson when I was young and just starting out in journalism. I was writing a weekly column for Time Out magazine in London, and it was Christmas, and I was like desperate to go home. You know, I had to get the train to visit my family. and I was writing a column, and I was like a sentence short. There was like a space where I needed to write one more sentence. And so I wrote that this was the year that Paul McCartney's Rupert Bear and the frog chorus song was everywhere.

Yeah. I don't know if you remember that song. No. It's not a great song. Anyway, so I wrote, oh my God, that Paul McCartney, Rupert Bear song. You know, I'm so sick of it. Mark Chapman shot the wrong beetle. Oh, my God.

Then I got a letter a couple of weeks later from Linda McCartney saying, are you telling me that my husband and father of my children should be murdered by the man who killed his best friend? So I wrote back, you know, apologetically and said, you know, I thought you lived in icon land. And she wrote back saying, you know, I understand no worries. And that was it. But ever since then, that's always hovered over me. Like, you know, everybody's human. John Ronson is the author of So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which comes out this week.

Reply Al's hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. If you want to check out a written version of the story, which features, among other things, the notorious photograph of Lindsay Stone, go to dig.com slash tag slash reply dash all. We were produced this week by Tim Howard, Truthypina Menini, and edited by Alex Bloomberg. Matt Lieber is a catharsis that you only reach after years of therapy, after you've almost given up on yourself.

Our show was mixed by the Reverend John DeLore. Special thanks this week to the BBC, Sylvie Douglas, Kelly Prime, and Starly Kine. Our theme music is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder, and our ad music is by build buildings. You can find us at iTunes.com slash replyall or replyall.com, which was designed in partnership with athletics.

Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.