Scheff is "a con artist," "a crook" and "a fraud," according to
the messages, which peppered blogs and Internet forums for parents
of troubled teens.
Soon, calls to Scheff's Parents Universal Resource Experts
dropped by half, said Scheff, 45, who lives in Weston, Fla. "People
would say: 'You know, I just read this about you online. How do I
know I can trust you?' "
Scheff, whose 6-year-old service usually draws a lot of traffic,
is a victim of an emerging phenomenon: online smear campaigns,
which can wreak havoc in the victims' professional and business
lives at the touch of a few keystrokes.
"It is happening ... on more or less every Web site where people
can create content," said Michael Fertik, a co-founder of
ReputationDefender, a Palo Alto-based group that helps clients
remove damaging content from the Internet. "From underage people,
to university people, to graduate school people, to older people,
to people who are being targeted by exes, to people who are being
targeted by ex-business partners, colleagues at work."
Millions of Americans use Internet search engines and social
networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to learn more about
prospective dates, neighbors and colleagues. One in 4 hiring
managers use online search engines like Google to screen job
candidates, a survey by the CareerBuilder job search engine showed
last fall. The Internet has become a 21st century credit report
service.
The catch: Anyone can post any information about anyone, however
false, on any one of the thousands of Internet sites with
modifiable content. Once posted, defamatory information can be
stored on the Web forever, accessible to anyone via a simple
search.
"You would Google my name, and what would come up was 'beware of
Sue Scheff,' " said Scheff, 45, who eventually won an $11.3 million
defamation lawsuit last fall against the mother from Louisiana,
Carey Bock, the author of most of the original postings accusing
Scheff of fraud that started appearing in 2003. "It was ugly. It
was horrible."
Bock, 49, told The Chronicle last week that she will appeal the
decision, handed down by a jury in Florida's Broward County Circuit
Court. "I don't think I've done anything wrong," she said.
"There have always been cases of people speaking their minds
without thinking of ramifications," and defamatory postings are
"simply a new expression of that," said Rebecca Jeschke,
spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco
nonprofit legal organization that advocates digital rights and free
speech.
In contrast to ReputationDefender, she said, the foundation
counsels many people "who are being accused of defamation, who say
what they said was an opinion."
Because it is often hard to tell fiction from fact, employers
sometimes unwittingly allow falsehoods posted on the Internet to
inform their decisions about prospective employees, said Larry
Ponemon, president and founder of the Michigan-based Ponemon
Institute, which specializes in privacy research.
"Cyber-slamming is a recent phenomenon (that is) going to create
an entire area of legal issues for people who were denied potential
employment because someone decided to publish slanderous
information on them," Ponemon said.
A February survey by the institute showed that roughly one-third
of Internet searches by hiring managers yielded content that became
the basis for denying jobs to the candidates.
That's what one Yale law student believes happened to her
earlier this year when none of the 16 law firms to which she had
applied for a summer job made her an offer. The student, who did
not want her name used because she feared retribution online, has
published articles in legal journals -- which The Chronicle has
read -- and says she has "great grades."
She was one of several female Yale law students singled out by
anonymous contributors to a popular law school message board on
AutoAdmit.com, a discussion forum for law students.
The postings, also seen by The Chronicle, contain derogatory
references to her mental capacity and sexual activity, claim she
had sexually transmitted diseases, and threaten sexual violence
against her.
The woman said the law firm representatives who had interviewed
her must have seen these comments. She said the representatives had
asked her for personal information that she had not included in her
resume, but which appears alongside the AutoAdmit.com postings when
her name is searched on Google.
"That's really unprecedented; most students get multiple job
offers. I have been applying in an area I have an immense expertise
in. I knew my stuff," said the student, who said she does not know
who wrote the anonymous postings.
Law firms are reluctant to hire students whose names are
associated with anything scandalous, said another Yale law student.
An AutoAdmit.com chat last winter discussed the student's breasts
and posted her photographs.
"They don't want their clients to be able to Google their
attorney's names and see this," she explained.
The women had asked Jarret Cohen, the owner of AutoAdmit.com, to
remove the discussions, but he had refused.
"It's a slippery slope once you start deciding what is and what
isn't allowed to be said," Cohen, a 23-year-old insurance broker in
Pennsylvania, wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. He acknowledged
that violations of privacy on discussion boards are "part of a
growing social problem on the Internet."
Harold Koh, dean of Yale Law School, denounced the assertions on
AutoAdmit.com as "false and hurtful" in an open letter to the law
school students. "These malicious attacks, as well as racist,
sexist and homophobic speech, have no place in the Yale Law School
community," Koh wrote. AutoAdmit.com is not affiliated with
Yale.
Under current law, a court cannot oblige the owner of a site
hosting defamatory postings to remove the offensive content, said
Fertik, whose company has hundreds of clients across 17
countries.
ReputationDefender (http://www.reputationdefender.com/),
which was founded last fall, charges $29.95 to try to remove each
item from the Internet, and a monthly fee of $9.95 to continue to
monitor postings about an existing client.
Sporadic attempts to rein in defamatory content have been
unsuccessful so far. Last month, bloggers denounced as censorship a
call to ban anonymous comments and delete abusive posts. The
proposal by Tim O'Reilly, a book publisher and chief of O'Reilly
Media Inc., came after Kathy Sierra, a Colorado blogger, received
anonymous death threats and was frightened into canceling her
appearance at O'Reilly's conference in San Diego.
Damaging postings don't always come from ill-wishers.
Individuals post provocative information or pictures of themselves,
only to learn later that employers see these posts as reason not to
hire them, said Jennifer Sullivan, a spokeswoman for
CareerBuilder.
Applicants typically get in trouble, she said, by posting
"information or photos that show them drinking or using drugs or
being irresponsible," Sullivan said.
"The Internet is a big tattooing machine that makes you relive
momentary mistakes and lapses in judgment that we all make," said
Fertik, who said ReputationDefender often helps people remove items
they had posted on the Internet about themselves.
Still, it hurts far more when such postings appear without the
knowledge of their subjects -- as happened to Danté Roberson, a
jazz and hip-hop drummer from Oakland. When an anonymous posting on
MySpace.com in January accused him of being a thief, Roberson hired
ReputationDefender, which persuaded the owner of the specific
MySpace.com page to remove the offending post that Roberson said
could have cost him numerous gigs.
"Who wants to have all that kind of mess in their camp?" said
Roberson, who makes a living touring with bands. "You are trying to
run a clean and sober camp and all of a sudden this (appears). Who
wants to have this dirtiness on them?"