Don Troiano on Blogger: DEFENDING YOUR NAME AS A CYBERSTALKING VICTIM BY D...

Don Troiano on Blogger: DEFENDING YOUR NAME AS A CYBERSTALKING VICTIM BY D...: Important dos and don’ts of what to do when you are confronted by a cyber stalker Stalking has been going on forever ...

DEFENDING YOUR NAME WHEN A CYBER STALKER STRIKES

Important dos and don’ts of what to do when you are confronted by a cyber stalker

Stalking has been going on forever and now stalkers have new tools to harm you in ways not conceivable just 10 years ago. Today a stalker can attack a victim on social media, bulletin boards, comment sections on media and lastly on negative review web sites. To make things worse it can all be done anonymously and therefore protects the stalker from prosecution. Here is how a victim can fight back.

The first thing a victim needs to do is take a step back and do not do or write anything online acknowledging the stalker for a couple of reasons. Number one is replying to the stalker will often give them satisfaction that they know they are causing the victim pain and in other cases can anger the stalker worse. In both cases the fact is, acknowledging the stalker is only more likely to bring on more posts and further exacerbate the situation. The second reason and more important is when a victim replies to these attacks it actually makes the attacks stronger in the search engines as it has more content. Whatever a victim does do not respond in any way to these attacks.

A second thing a victim can do is contact webmaster of sites the stalker is utilizing to attack the victim. Many, not all web masters will recognize the fact that the content on their site is being used for cyber stalking and a mere email request will get things done. Other web masters may take a little more persuasion and constant emails will often help. Please note not to threaten the web master and simply plead your case. For certain sites the web master is looking to charge a fee and it can be a great deal of money and that option will probably be off the table for many victims. Additionally some of the sites are negative review sites that actually promote negative content and have high web authority so removal from these sites will usually be the most damning and costly to remove.

The third thing a victim can do is a full blown reputation management campaign. I would suggest hiring a quality firm for this if the cost is within the victims budget. Reputation Pros has a very good and cost effective membership program at less then $300 per month. If these costs are out of reach then it is time to roll up your sleeves.  A full blown reputation management campaign is very laborious, but a victim can achieve good results simply by building a positive web presence that can push the negative content deep in to search results. This is achieved by posting a vast amount of positive content through social media, blog posts, owning a URL with the victims name and finally by garnering positive news pieces with the victim named in articles.

Last if not least a victim can sue the stalker in court and gain “injunctive relief” that the victim can bring to the search engines in request for de indexing the sites posting the negative content.  If a victim chooses this method it is important to note that the victim should have every single page listed within the order to make sure all pages with negative content are removed from search results. It also needs to be noted that suing can be a complicated and costly process.

In conclusion a victim can fight back against cyber stalking. It will not be easy. It will not be free, but if the victim is as motivated as the stalker they can achieve a positive outcome. It will take patience and perseverance and a lot of learning, but a positive outcome can be achieved.

By Don Troiano

About the author

Don Troiano is an executive with Reputation Pros a reputation management company and a former cyber stalking victim.

Don Troiano- Cyber Defamation

Privacy has always been a right and today there are many laws set in place to protect those rights like      HIPPA and others. Today however an individual’s or brand’s right to privacy no longer exists. With the internet and specifically Google any privacy we once enjoyed is now pretty much gone. What is also gone is the right of fair play, honesty and often reality found in those search results. If the 2016 election showed us nothing; it showed us just how reality and facts can be altered or just plain changed in the cyber age.  The old adage innocent till proven guilty is now way back in the rear view mirror of reality of the internet. Today one must prove their innocence without any proof whatsoever regarding facts, reality or guilt. A recent article I read regarding cyber defamation the author actually suggests to those who may have been wrongfully defamed on the internet, “the best thing you can do is apologize for the offending content when applying for jobs, meeting a perspective mate and even when trying to conduct business.”

There is a host of web sites today ready, willing and able to assist a stalker or corporate saboteur to post anything they like regarding anyone or any brand anonymously without fear of liability or consequences. These dubious web sites have one goal in mind when accepting this content. The final goal is to make money. The business model is simply to appear at the top of any entities Google search results with the absolute worst possible financial impact on that entity. One of these web sites was called by a judge in a recent court filing “a sick form of cyber extortion.”  Simply put these sites charge large monthly or yearly fees to redact, remove or conceal the content located in their pages.  It has spurred a multimillion dollar industry that only looks to grow until laws are changed to respond to this new form of extortion. 

There is very little legal recourse to resolve the issues that arise from cyber attacks.   The American Bar Association has published a piece regarding this unique relatively new form of attack in the article dated to 2013 Cyber Defamation. Within the article it talks about the difficulties with prosecution as in many cases the author are anonymous and the web sites that actually publish the content are protected by the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The act protects publishers of third party content from any form of liability since they are only a form for the author to exercise their first amendment right to freedom of speech.  There has been successful prosecution of anonymous authors, but the cost is high and the only satisfaction a party can receive is an injunction for redaction or removal from web sites and search engine results. The process is lengthy and costly as you may have guessed and many sites simply ignore these injunctions as does Google in many cases today.

Online Reputation Management (ORM) seems to be the only realistic resolution to the problems of cyber defamation. Quite simply fighting fire with fire by having relevant positive information appear at the top of an entities Google search results. Pushing the negative content to the back pages where few searchers ever actually look. Reputation Pros a top Reputation Management firm does this every day. Sounds quite easy on the surface and most people think it will be. Ultimately it is not. Let us not forget that the defamation sites have a financial interest in holding top rankings on a Google search and other web pages like news media are held in very high regard in Google search rankings. There are things an entity can do like posting social media sites and blogs in the hope that the content will outrank the offending negative content. The fact is that most individual entities who try thin on their own will fail.  There is a reason large corporations, famous individuals and even simple business owners pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for quality effective reputation management.

Don Troiano - Information.