
Trolls are no longer hiding under bridges. The are actively lurking online–and ready to eat your lunch!
By Mike Hughes
According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, in Internet parlance a “troll” is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, slanderous, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a discussion forum, chat room or blog. The troll’s primary intent is to provoke emotional responses or otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. While most webmasters and forum administrators consider trolls to be a scourge on their sites, some websites welcome them as an opportunity for profit.
As a Peabody Award-winning documentary director for NBC in New York, I strongly believe in protecting free speech and have fought actively over my 30 years in the media to defend it. In traditional media, free speech reigns within reasonable legal boundaries and limitations of defamation laws, which require that the truth be told to the public under threat of legal penalties. Tragically, that is not the case with online media and many American businesses are being eaten alive because of it.
Reputation assaults by trolls represent a menacing and growing problem. Their actions encroach on direct-to-consumer commerce and our entire society’s free speech rights. Slanderous and false online postings are being enabled and protected from traditional slander and libel laws because of what amounts to a legal loophole known as the Communications Decency Act (CDA). Reportedly, the CDA was made into law so our legislators could avoid ruling on the political hot potato of community standards regarding pornography. To date, lawmakers have not been motivated to adjust the CDA to also protect and sustain our expectations of truth within free speech and to keep our rights from being trampled on by free-wheeling, online trolls acting with impunity.
The CDA loophole has allowed a few questionable entrepreneurs to create their own perfect storm of disruption and reputation assaults, inciting and hosting the most outrageous kangaroo courts imaginable. They persecute products and services for their own profit motives–and they have blanket protection under current Internet law. In the 1925 literary classic “The Trial,” Franz Kafka tells the story of a man prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his offense confusing to both him and the reader–a disturbing nightmare.
Likewise, a nightmare of confusion is ruling the day online when it comes to products being crippled by anonymous trolls posting false or dubious complaints about products, services and companies. In some cases, individual entrepreneurs can operate as judges by running their own privately owned and operated consumer complaint sites and using them as their own online fiefdoms.
I can only describe these sites and tactics as “questionable” until the CDA is more fully shaped by Congress to cover online defamation. The broad legal strokes of the CDA give questionable site operators absolute power on decisions about reputation assault postings because of their immunity to slander and libel laws. And we all know what happens when any group of individuals has absolute power.
Most people worldwide look in awe at the American judicial system and view it as the gold standard of legal systems. Consumers with legitimate complaints have many means of addressing their needs, including small claims courts, attorney general offices, state and city consumer complaint mediation, as well as the Better Business Bureau, chambers of commerce and the non-profit American Arbitration Association. The latter now offers professional mediation services online.
Unfortunately, online posting sites have become the go-to spot for consumers who do not have a legitimate complaint and wish to blow off steam about their purchase decision with false reputation assaults and, in doing so, become trolls. American law is sadly lagging behind Italian law, which has wisely banned this online conduct.
To infer that every business listed on a questionable site is a rip-off or every product listed is a scam is no more accurate than using an ethnic slur to describe everyone of a certain race. This behavior replaces truth with emotional and broad generalities. This is always a stupid and often an oppressive and evil thing to do.
The biggest problem is that consumer awareness lags far behind this new reality due to the blinding speed of the Internet. Most are unaware that a posting they may be reading is not even in the same universe of credibility as reports from organizations such as the Better Business Bureau or Consumer Reports magazine. A blistering attack on an unregulated reputation site may have been written by a frustrated, underemployed man who kicked his dog and beat his wife before posting a hate rant about someone he saw on TV whose face he didn’t like.
As Seth Godin writes in his bestselling marketing book Purple Cow, “It’s people who have projects that are never criticized who ultimately fail. Will you do some things wrong in your career and be unjustly criticized for being unprepared, sloppy or thoughtless? Sure you will. We often respond to criticism by hiding, avoiding the negative feedback and thus (ironically) guaranteeing we won’t succeed. The only way to avoid criticism is by being boring.”
It is vitally important that products, services and businesses be criticized truthfully and fairly without a troll escalating the criticism to barroom drama that disrupts normal on-topic discussion and kills the enterprise.
The Damage Done
At ReputationMedia.com we have interviewed hundreds of business owners and have discovered the ravages done to perfectly legitimate businesses that now need professional help to tackle these publicity and reputation challenges. The problems only escalate if the business owner files a rebuttal on a questionable site. This action moves the posting up to a higher search-engine ranking and often angers the person posting the complaint to launch further attack.
An unfairly attacked business owner must recognize when he or she is being “worked” by professionals who own these questionable sites and who may wish to leverage the business owner’s fallen status to gain what might be called “protection money” in the form of counter-posting fees.
Business owners today need professional help and publicity advice–in addition to legal reform. Consistently helpful legal recourse for them has not yet been found and may come too late for them to remain in business. When businesses are forced to close their doors because of a troll’s false posting, jobs are lost and more foreclosure signs go up on the houses in our neighborhoods.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas L. Friedman recently commented on Meet the Press, “Online postings should come with the warning, Caution: reading this may be hazardous to your mental health.”
Our advice to business owners is to confront this situation head-on with awareness followed by building a “firewall” of backlinks to positive, “white publicity” stories about your business in advance. Advance backlinking is designed to prevent the first negative comment about a business from rising to the top of Google as fast as a weather balloon. This is one way to protect your marketing investment against trolls who hack into the minds of your prospective customers with mental viruses by posting slanderous or off-topic messages to disrupt normal, on-topic product presentations.
Before launching a new product or ad campaign, ask yourself if it’s wise to build your castle on anything less than a solid foundation. A wise marketer today will consider the precautionary steps of posting hundreds of links every month to positive content about themselves, the product and the company as much in advance as possible to protect his or her investment, assets and good name from a lurking troll. Once an online publicity campaign is launched for only a few thousand dollars, the monthly fee for backlinking to good publicity can be as low as $200 per month.
Winning the War
Trolls and troll sites promoting reputation assaults are unlikely to stop any time soon. On the contrary, they are growing and expanding in scope because unethical marketers now look for the first signs of competitor companies or products impeding their success. Online, success means traffic that can be stolen and more traffic means more business.
It’s simple to divert traffic from its intended destination to a troll’s site by posting a phony online assault sign such as, “Wait! Don’t be scammed–buy our sure-fire humdinger instead.” Sometimes, this is the only way an inferior product can hope to compete with a superior competitor.
The trolls are winning. Every day they become more emboldened and empowered by the growing number of questionable sites which are posing as consumer advocacy sites. They justify reprehensible activities by posing as “the good guys” as they conduct their businesses as wolves in sheep’s clothing. They need to be outed for who they are–the trolls leading the trolls–and they need to be regulated or neutralized in some way.
Questionable sites have empowered trolls with unlimited potential for unethical extortion, which is being used and will likely expand dramatically if not stopped.
Two women recently walked into a Berkeley coffee shop and demanded free coffee, stating that if their demand wasn’t met they would file a slanderous complaint about the small shop on a complaint site.
Business owners are even being threatened with an online slander assault when they simply invoice an individual for a past due account.
Where does it stop?
I believe the following actions are needed:
Increased public awareness through campaigns focused on consumer advocacy fraud.
Direct lobbying efforts toward members of U.S. Congress and to U.S. Senator Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs should call Senator Snowe’s office to ask her to review the Communications Decency Act and to join other professionals in asking Google to end their support of unscrupulous or questionable sites that exploit business owners.
Some sort of plan, executed by an association or organization of Internet properties–including consumer advocacy sites–to promote self-regulation through creating common practices and industry standards, as other association such as the Electronic Retailing Association has done.
The promotion of business owner awareness that a dollar of prevention is worth ten thousand dollars of cure. Using backlinks to accurate, positive content in advance is as vital as computer virus protection.
If you don’t take control, some troll may take control from you–and with it your hard-earned reputation, your income, possibly your health and your hope for continued American small business innovation.
Mike Hughes is a direct marketer, PR consultant and a frequent speaker on Internet publicity. He can be reached at mhughes@reputationmedia.com.