Libel Inc: An Analysis of the Libel Site Ecosystem

Libel sites publish anonymously submitted un-proven libelous claims about individuals that often include personal information about the subject. The stated goal of the sites is to 'warn' the public about an individual but the impact is harassment and ruining the subject's reputation. These individual libelous posts are surfaced when searching for a person's name using an online search engine and can cause a range of harms from emotional to economic. For example, the libelous posts might surface if a potential employer performs a Google search as part of a 'background check.' There have been prior news reports of this troubling phenomena but no systematic analysis of the ecosystem. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous analysis of these libel sites, supporting services, and intervention by Google. We discovered and analyzed 9 libel sites, 7 websites for reputation management services, and 12 related websites. We found that all of the libel websites included at least one method of generating revenue. The most common revenue generation method was including advertisements for 'reputation management services' which require payment for the removal of a post. We found that all of these removal services were dubious in nature and that the removal policies were akin to extortion. Our analysis of Google's intervention to reduce the visibility of these websites indicated that it appeared to only reduce the visibility of the specific libel post URL but that other URLs containing links to the post or the headline text of the post were still highly ranked. Based on our findings, we make recommendations to many of the stakeholders about potential approaches for mitigating this abusive ecosystem.