If you make online enemies it could effect your prospects for future employment. Ellen Nakashima has an article on how this is happening to law students seeking to enter the legal field, but it is happening to the online blogging community, as well.
She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers.
Though it is difficult to prove a direct link, the woman thinks she is a victim of a new form of reputation-maligning: online postings with offensive content and personal attacks that can be stored forever and are easily accessible through a Google search.
What kind of stuff is getting posted?
The chats sometimes include photos taken from women’s Facebook pages, and in the Yale student’s case, one person threatened to sexually violate her. Another participant claimed to be the student, making it appear that she was taking part in the discussion.
Ah yes…posting pictures without consent (because you can), making threats (legal or otherwise), sockpuppetry… It’s all painfully familiar. And here’s the rub.
The students’ tales reflect the pitfalls of popular social-networking sites and highlight how social and technological changes lead to new clashes between free speech and privacy. The chats are also a window into the character of a segment of students at leading law schools. Penn officials said they have known about the site and the complaints for two years but have no legal grounds to act against it.
That’s really the bottom line. There are no legal grounds for acting against someone that wants to sully your reputation using the tools of the internet.
Employers, including law firms, frequently do Google searches as part of due diligence checks on prospective employees. According to a December survey by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy research organization, roughly half of U.S. hiring officials use the Internet in vetting job applications. About one-third of the searches yielded content used to deny a job, the survey said.
If you point out to people that posting derogatory information about people and linking that to their workplace will damage them, you get responses like this:
They outed themselves.
They should have known better.
Call a lawyer, it’s not against the law.
It’s all on the Internet anyway.
Of course, this is all entirely beside the point. The point is not that information is available that can be used to damage someone, the issue is that people that use that information to damage people are being malicious and should be criticized.
It’s particularly galling when such behavior comes from people that are at least ostensibly political allies, or are passing themselves off as innocent members of blogging communities.
I don’t write this to whine about legitimate criticism, or even illegitimate criticism. I write this to make people aware that there is a growing cottage industry of people that are looking to damage the careers of bloggers and blogging community members that they have some kind of grievance with. There’s no money in it (at least, I don’t think there is). It’s more done out of simple spite.
The really ridiculous part of this can be seen in what’s its done in the Law Student field.
The trend has even spawned a new service, ReputationDefender, whose mission is to search for damaging content online and destroy it on behalf of clients. Generally, the law exempts site operators from liability for the content posted by others, though it does not prevent them from removing offensive items.
“For many people the Internet has become a scarlet letter, an albatross,” said Michael Fertik, ReputationDefender’s chief executive.
That’ll never happen in political blogging community. People will just stop participating. It’s such a brilliant way to undermine blogs that it’s shocking the Republicans didn’t think of it before disaffected Kossacks did.
Since this is a meta thread, I guess I’ll add that Armando has been banned by Markos from Daily Kos. Armando claims it was done at the behest of DHinMI and Plutonium Page. That’s just his opinion. Apparently they suddenly noticed that Armando wasn’t civil. That’s a fine way to reward his loyalty. I used to get angry emails from Armando anytime anyone so much as thought of criticizing Markos and/or Daily Kos. Armando’s flamewars jacked up the pageviews at Daily Kos into the stratosphere. I guess he’s no longer convenient.
Armando acted unforgivably in the orange threads for several years. He made many enemies. But that is still no reason to try to do him harm or get him fired. And it’s a little late to ban him for it.
