The Internet Never Forgets

Make one false move online and strangers could ruin your life. Just ask the shaming victims who tried to rebuild theirs.

It’s been 16 years since Sue Scheff’s name and reputation were dragged through the mud, and she still feels scarred by it.

“I still cringe if I Google myself, which I rarely do,” she says. “I don’t like giving my name out—I still have issues with trust—and there will always be an underlying fear of being attacked online.”

Public shaming has become commonplace in today’s internet culture—Last Week Tonight host John Oliver called it “one of America’s favorite pastimes”—but back in 2003, it was almost unheard of. Scheff had no idea what to expect, or how to contain it.

Scheff’s ordeal happened when she was running Parents Universal Resource Experts, a southern Florida-based parent advocacy group that helps place troubled teens in reform schools.

A disgruntled client, Carey Bock—who, Scheff says, “never truly used my consulting services, she just called my office”—felt that Scheff was referring children to allegedly abusive programs. So she took her grievances online, deriding Scheff as a “con artist” and “crook” on bulletin boards, blog forums, and PTA sites.

“She said I exploited families, abused kids, kidnapped kids,” remembers Scheff. “Of course it then grew into a mob-like mentality of trolls, shouting hateful comments at me.”

Soon the comments became sexual, and frighteningly aggressive.

“Before I knew it, people were impersonating me online, creating fake email addresses in my name,” she says. “It was absolutely horrifying.”

She filed a defamation lawsuit against Bock, and in 2006 was awarded $11.3 million in damages. But the victory felt hollow. “When the verdict was read, I had that moment of bliss,” she says. “But then I quickly remembered, the internet never forgets.”

SWALLOWED BY THE MOB

Scheff was the web’s canary in a coal mine, one of the first to fall victim to the internet mob and live to tell the tale. Although reports at the time predicted her court case would set a legal precedent, it didn’t slow down troll culture at all.

What we did learn from Scheff is that with online shaming, there’s no such thing as total vindication. Even when you win, you don’t really win.

“There’s no delete button online,” she says. “Just when you think you’re doing better, something can pop up and trigger your emotions. It is truly like PTSD. It isn’t something you just move on from.”

If every case like Scheff’s went to trial today, the courts would be clogged with trolls and their lawyers. According to Pew Research, roughly four in 10 Americans have personally experienced online harassment, and 62 percent consider it a major problem.

But then again, it isn’t fair to paint all victims of internet shaming with the same brush. Some people, while maybe not deserving to have their lives destroyed, are at least guilty of very poor judgment.

Remember Justine Sacco? She was the PR rep who got on a plane bound for South Africa in 2013 and tweeted, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” (She was fired, because obviously, but then got rehired five years later by the very same company.)

But not everyone is the architect of their own downfall. Many are innocent bystanders, like Kyle Quinn, a University of Arkansas professor mistakenly identified as a white supremacist. Though somebody who looked like his doppelganger appeared in a 2017 photo, taken at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, it wasn’t actually Quinn.

Or the Australian dad who tried to take a selfie in front of a Darth Vader display at Target in 2015, and when he had the audacity to talk to some unattended children, he was photographed by their mother, who jumped to the ridiculous conclusion that he was a pedophile.

Both men were eventually exonerated. But did that mean they were able to move on? Or was Scheff right that the Internet really never forgets?

“I KNOW THAT SENSE OF HOPELESSNESS, LONELINESS, AND FEAR THAT NO ONE WILL UNDERSTAND.”

University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner thinks it’s the latter. As he wrote for Slate, it’s not like small-town society, where being ostracized, rightly or wrongly, didn’t mean the end of you. You could always just leave town and start over.

“One can’t leave the Internet,” Posner wrote. “Once shamed, always shamed.”

Even after her court victory, Scheff says she was still paralyzed with fear, so much that she didn’t leave the house for weeks.

“I feel like I barely made it out alive at the time,” says Scheff, now 57. “When I hear about young people being shamed or bullied online, I get it. I know that sense of hopelessness, loneliness, and fear that no one will understand.”

If she thought the lawsuit would bring an end to her career troubles, she was very wrong. Not long after, a psychologist colleague called and asked if she’d Googled herself recently.

“He told me he’d attempted to send a few clients my way, but they Googled me and asked if he realized who I was. Of course they saw all the horrible things posted about me.”

Career damage is just one of the reasons somebody might want evidence of their public shaming to, if not disappear, at least fade from view.

“We hear everything under the sun,” says Rich Matta, CEO at digital image rehabilitation firm ReputationDefender. “‘I can’t get a job,’ ‘I’m just embarrassed by it,’ ‘I want to be remembered differently,’ ‘I don’t want my kids to suffer from this,’ sometimes even, ‘I’m worried this is keeping me from getting a date.’ There are so many different ways that online shaming can destroy people’s lives and livelihoods.”

THE ART OF DEFENSE

Many of the people we contacted for this story declined to talk about their experiences, out of fear of further repercussions. One woman, who was so viciously bullied by online trolls six years ago that she considered suicide, said that revisiting the incident would put her “in the crosshairs for further abuse. A chorus of, ‘dumb b***h got what she deserved’ will drown out any attempt at kindness.

“When I’ve participated in interviews or published essays, I’ve been met with rape and death threats,” she continued (asking that we not reveal her name). “No matter how much of a positive spin the article puts on my survival.”

Not everyone opted against participating because it might awaken the trolls. Matta wouldn’t even mention the names of clients they’ve successfully litigated, because sharing those details would just “highlight our clients’ reputation issues that we’ve helped them move past, and the risk that our good work for them will be undone.”

The internet never forgets, but it also loves attention. It cares about what’s popular. If the skeleton in your internet closet haven’t been talked about in years, it falls to the bottom of search-engine results. But if it’s mentioned even once…

“It can create a vicious cycle in which people see a negative or embarrassing search result,” says Matta. “And by clicking on it, they continue to reinforce Google’s conclusion that this is the most relevant and important information to be shown about you.”

ReputationDefender’s strategy: Instead of cease-and-desist letters and threatening lawsuits, they try to outsmart the algorithm.

“We write and publish a wave of truthful, objective content on their behalf, specifically optimized to rank well in Google and other search engines,” Matta says. “Over time, this new content has the potential to displace any negative or unwanted material from page one of Google, thereby creating a virtuous cycle where people click on the right information about you.”

Over 90 percent of web searchers never go past page one of Google, he says, “so if you’re controlling page one, you’ve won most of the battle.”

Does it work? It’s hard to tell without knowing any of their clients. But there are clues that it’s easier said than done.

Lindsey Stone became a target for internet shaming in 2012, when she visited the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia and posed for a photo next to a sign that reads “silence and respect.” In what she later said was meant as a private joke for her and her friends, she pretended to scream and flip off the sign.

The photo, though originally shared privately on Stone’s Facebook page, leaked. And the reaction, to say the least, wasn’t kind.

Stone signed with ReputationDefender, according to a BusinessInsider story, who promised that they could make the notorious photo “practically vanish” from Google.

That was in 2015. A Google search of Stone’s name (as of this writing) found several mentions of the egregious photo on the first page, including a Change.org petition to get her fired from her job, and a story with the headline “Women Flipped Off Dead Soldiers, Then Life Decided to Smack Her Hard.”

Scheff had better luck. When she came to ReputationDefender in 2006, they had just recently launched. “It was only three employees,” she says. But within half a year, they’d rebuilt her image online, using what company founder Michael Fertik called “Google insulation.”

For every negative story or blog post about her, they countered with flattering content. Nothing was too silly or superfluous, including a Scheff-penned recipe for broccoli casserole and pork chops. (Spoiler: Scheff can’t cook and hates broccoli.)

She also turned the tables on the bad press by becoming an advocate against online bullying, writing about her experiences in books like 2017’s Shame Nation: The Global Epidemic of Online Hate (which includes a forward by Monica Lewinsky).

Though Scheff is a textbook case for reclaiming your online reputation, the fight doesn’t always have to be taken to those extremes, says Matta. Sometimes it’s enough just to “present the online world with a different narrative about yourself.”

Which is exactly what Christopher Hermelin did.

THE PERKS OF BEING A PARIAH

During the summer of 2012, Hemelin, an aspiring author from Brooklyn—who worked by day at a real estate office—decided to try something different. Calling himself the Roving Typist, Hermelin traveled between parks in Manhattan with his vintage Royal Safari typewriter (which he’d bought at a yard sale for $10), offering to write one-of-a-kind stories for whoever happened to wander past, for whatever they could afford to pay him.

Somebody took a photo of him, sans the “Donate What You Can” sign, and posted it on Reddit. The vitriol came fast and furious.

“F***ing hipster piece of sh**,” one user commented.

“When I look at this guy I see something like Kim Kardashian except with worse fashion sense,” another remarked. “Just an attention whore with zero brains.”

And another: “If you think this picture is bad, just imagine what kind of overwrought tripe is on those pages.”

Hermelin’s friend alerted him to the Reddit smackdown, and not only did he read the comments—the one thing we’ve all learned, as online survivalists, never to do—but he also responded.

“This is a surprisingly angry thread,” he wrote.

Hermelin shared the backstory, and even a glimpse of one of the stories he’d written. “All I wanted to do was explain away the miscommunication of why I was typewriting outside,” he says.

The Reddit mob backed off, and Hermelin felt confident that “it was the end.” But just a few days later, the photo reappeared as a meme, with the caption “You’re not a real hipster until you’ve taken a typewriter to the park.” It took the internet by storm, getting shared hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

And then his ex-girlfriend wrote about him, with a tell-all essay called “I Got Dumped By A Meme.” It just added fuel to the fire.

Rather than continuing to explain himself, pushing back against the public mockery, Hermelin did something remarkable.

He just … accepted it.

“The incident led to some of the most incredible experiences of my life,” he says. Because he became more recognizable, he started his own website, where he could “take orders for stories for people from afar, not just people that found me outside.”

“ALL YOU CAN DO IS KEEP LIVING.”

Hemelin has since written hundreds of stories for people across the globe, which has included “helping people propose, celebrating at people’s weddings, and typing horoscopes in mansions at costume parties. None of that would’ve happened without that picture going viral.”

Having his photo misappropriated in a meme should still be following him like a black cloud. Instead, Hermelin insists it’s “one of the great joys of my life.”

It’s not that easy for everybody. It helps that Hermelin did nothing wrong—no AIDS jokes, no flipping off graves—but it’s not like the internet has a track record for showing mercy for the innocent.

If Hermelin has figured anything out, it’s that fighting against an online tsunami of rage will only make you drown faster.

“Nothing can prepare you for it, and nothing you learn from it is applicable anywhere else,” he says. “You just have to be the change you want to see.”

If Hermelin has a mantra that’s helped him make it through, it’s this: What’s past is past.

“All you can do is keep living,” he says, “and hope that kindness and understanding will guide you to someplace better eventually.”

But just to be safe, he won’t be returning anytime soon to the New York park where his infamous photo was taken. “Not because the picture left a bad taste in my mouth,” he says. “I just figure, it’s someone else’s turn up there.”