The Link Between the Slander Industry and Reputation Management

By: Anna Cave

In a world where an individual’s online presence can be just as important as the experience listed on their resume, it’s been standard practice to keep social presences appropriate for the workplace. 

Some aspects of online presence are completely under an individual’s control. It’s fairly easy to maintain owned social profiles to keep them aligned with professional standards. Monitoring what friends and family say or post of an individual is slightly more difficult, but still an aspect of  online persona that can be managed. However, when it comes to strangers posting about others on the internet, things could quickly spiral out of control. 

Aaron Krolik, a writer for The New York Times, tried it out for himself. In his article for The Times, he detailed how he authored a self-slanderous post to uncover how websites that thrive on destroying reputations work. His post spiraled, ending up on several gripe sites, or “website(s) through which people can express their contempt for a particular person, organization, pop group, etc.” They’re the digital version of tabloids, filled with nasty statements about people with no real evidence. Any rumor could end up on them, and because slander often appears on more than one gripe site, it tends to rank pretty highly in search engine results by gaining credibility on Google through repetitive content. The kicker? It’ll cost thousands to remove information from these sites.

After Krolik’s post about himself circulated through several gripe sites, he reached out to a reputation management company that informed him that the cost of wiping his internet slate clean would set him back $20,000. 

That’s quite a hefty price to pay, but that’s not the worst part. The problem with the slander industry, as Krolik calls it, is that the same people that run the gripe sites are the ones running the reputation management companies people pay to remove the slander. Krolik noticed advertisements for reputation management companies on several of the gripe sites, a pattern that stood out because the majority of ads purchased for websites are usually programmatic. Programmatic ads are such a popular way to advertise that it is expected that “88% of digital display marketing in the US is projected to be done via programmatic advertising” by the end of 2021. It wouldn’t make sense for there to be such a strong link between reputation management ads and gripe sites if they were not purposefully placed there.

Krolik then reached out to actual clients who had hired reputation management companies in the past. He found that customers would pay the original fee and the posts would be quickly removed until these companies began threatening that the posts would reappear and multiply, which they did a few months later. 

After working with Aaron Greenspan, a man who runs PlainSite.org to make court documents and criminal records easier to find, Krolik found that the man responsible for running one of the reputation management companies. His name is Vikram Parmar, a convicted criminal who charged people to apply for fake jobs with India’s Central Bureau of Investigation. It was found that Parmar was linked to several other reputation management companies and gripe sites.

The conclusion? The same person who was running sites that slandered people in the first place was the one asking for money to remove the posts, only for them to reappear later on, creating a vicious cycle. 

Thankfully, there is a free solution for getting slander removed from Google’s search results. Though it is not a heavily advertised service, Google allows individuals to submit requests to remove slander from search results for free via a form. It’s not the perfect solution: while it will remove URLs, it is significantly more difficult to remove slanderous images. It is a start though, and significantly less costly--and more effective--than paying the same person to remove what they have already published. ​