Wild West 2.0: How to Protect and Restore Your Online Reputation on the Untamed Social Frontier

CHAPTER

207

You may feel shock, anger, and revulsion if you have found false in-

formation about you online. Many people experience these emotions

when they discover lies, false innuendo, and slander online, especially

if the falsehoods appear prominently in a Google search. Discovering

false information about you online can feel like learning that peers

are gossiping behind your back or that your online résumé has been

covered in hurtful graffiti. These feelings can be magnified if the false

information is prominent enough that it may be misleading friends,

co-workers, acquaintances, and others. You may also experience

feelings of powerlessness because there is often no immediately

Recovering from Online

Smears: Restoring Your

Reputation After the

Damage Has Been Done

208 Wild West 2.0

obvious way to complain about a website bearing false information

and no button to press to instantly fix it. And your feelings may be

intensified even further if the false information was put online by an

anonymous user; you may think, “How dare some coward hide be-

hind a cloak of anonymity when slinging lies and misinformation?”

These reactions are all perfectly normal. It can be a shock to

discover hurtful false information for the first time, whether it was

placed online intentionally or accidentally. It often hurts doubly be-

cause so many users still believe the “Google of Eden” myth—the

false impression that all Google results are pure, pristine, unbiased,

truthful, and accurate—almost as if Google were a gift from the

heavens. In reality, Google’s algorithm was written by humans, who

are necessarily imperfect. The algorithm depends on collecting in-

put from websites and blogs, many of which are biased or false.

And the algorithm is further corrupted by the self-reinforcing na-

ture of false Web content. Finding false information about you pre-

sented through Google is probably the fastest way to be dissuaded

of the myth of the Google of Eden (see Figure 12-1). If you have a

strong emotional reaction upon discovering false online content,

then talk about your feelings with friends and family before pro-

ceeding; it is important to recognize how you feel and to work

through your emotions before beginning the hard work of repair-

ing your reputation.

Once you have had time to process the initial shock, it is time to

start the hard work of repairing your reputation. The good news is

that your online reputation can be improved through careful appli-

cation of a few simple principles. The bad news is that reputation re-

pair takes time and effort, and sometimes a lot of both; it may take

a few weeks and a handful of hours to fix a minor problem, but it

may take several months and hundreds of hours of effort to repair

the worst of the damage following a serious attack.

The process of online reputation repair can be broken down into

three steps: understanding the problem, making a plan, and imple-

menting your plan. These steps are flexible; you will always be finding

new information, and you will almost always have to adjust your plan.

Step 1: Understand What Happened

As a cartoon hero once said, “Knowing is half the battle.”

1

Yo u r f i r s t

goal is to determine the extent of the reputation damage and to iden-

tify its original source. Understanding the extent and the source of

the false negative information will help you formulate a plan to deal

with it: You would need to create different plans for an intentional

and widespread attack and for an isolated accidental error.

Figure 12-1. Discovering false information about you on the Web can feel

like discovering hateful graffiti on your online résumé.

209Recovering from Online Smears