| 2: Who— who did they get killed, according to Jessica Taylor? |
| 1: Okay, so the one person she names is a 16-year-old named Princess Bliss, whose mom was something of a wannabe influencer. It's a sad story. So, Kathleen Stark, she described the situation in a piece in UnHerd. So, Jesse, please read this. |
| 2: Oh God. "Aged 4, Princess was featured in a 2014 television documentary getting a spray tan. The show was about mothers, including her own, Sophie Mae Dixon, who would painfully tease hair weaves into their tiny daughters' curls." I see why this is a Kathleen Stark story. "Dressed them in elaborate frills and furbelos?" |
| 1: Furbelos? |
| 2: What's that word? |
| 1: I don't— I don't know. |
| 2: Furbelo. Furbello. Someone's going to be a jerk to me that I don't know that word. |
| 1: I bet it's like— |
| 2: You can't— I don't know every word. You can't know every word. |
| 1: It's true. |
| 2: "And cover them in makeup and glitter. Some comic genius at Channel 5 called the show 'Blinging Up Baby'." Jesus. This feels very American to you. We export them all our— all our tit. |
| 1: It does, yeah. |
| 2: "Gleeful pieces in the tabloids followed, and a year later the mother also appeared on This Morning to discuss the excessive pampering of her two girls. The dye seemed to be cast. From then on, Princess Bliss and her sister would be turned into living dolls full-time, and when television ceased to be interested, Sophie Mae's social media accounts would take up the slack." I got to say, based on what I've read so far, it— it sounds like this poor girl ends up dead. It sounds like there's a lot of potential reasons for that. That might not have to do with anything that happened on Tattle, but continue. Tell me more. |
| 1: Right. So this is the kind of parenting that posters on snark forums like Tattle and Momsnet and Reddit tend to be very judgmental of. They see using kids as content, using your kids to get attention, as exploitation. And Sophie Mae definitely used her daughters for content, and then they became content creators themselves. So in February this year, after Princess died, Sophie Mae, the mom, she blamed online bullying, specifically Tattle. |
| 2: Was it suicide? |
| 1: It was suicide, yeah. |
| 2: I mean, that— I can't imagine losing a kid to suicide, but like, maybe look in the mirror a little bit in terms of contributing factors. But did Princess— I can imagine— I just, based on what you've told me about Tattle so far, I can much more see them ridiculing Sophie Mae than Princess. Did they have a threat on Princess or make fun of her? |
| 1: You're exactly right. They talked about Princess and her sister, whose name I believe was Precious, occasionally, but the thread was about Sophie Mae. And Sophie Mae says that Princess would read the posts and see people saying horrible things, not just about Mom, but about her. |
| 2: I feel like this gets back to, like, the gender divide in snark communities. A male snark community, I could see, viciously going after the teenage victim of a mom exploitation scheme. Tattle, sounds like, is not that demographic. But what— |
| 1: Do they have— what sort of, like, male snark forums are there? |
| 2: I mean, Kiwi Farms. |
| 1: I mean, Kiwi Farmses, yeah. |
| 2: Although, no, isn't it— you know what, I— even Kiwi Farms, and probably— |
| 1: It's got— it's got some girly vibes. |
| 2: Well, but I was going to say, even they, I think, in this case, would focus their ire on the mom. |
| 1: Okay, so I want to turn to the BBC for a second. So there's a British influencer and media personality named GK Barry. She was also a subject on Tattle, and the BBC hired her to host this documentary episode they called "Talks of Gossip." I want to watch a clip from that. This starts with GK Barry asking Sophie Mae a question. Jesse, they're going to show screenshots of the things people said about Princess Dixon on Tattle, and I want you to read those as this plays. |
| 2: This is what I was hoping you'd ask me to do, is read me comments about a dead teenager. Thank you, Katie. |
| 3: Teenager, yeah. If you can stop yourself from saying anything about Sophie Mae's appearance, well, I congratulate you. |
| 4: When did you become aware that she was reading it? |
| 2: I'll never forget. We had a takeaway this one time, and she was, like, eating extra chutneys, and telling me she's eating extra chutneys. And I always say to my children, if you can't talk to me about an issue, if you feel embarrassed or you feel whatever, write it down and then tell Mommy that way. |
| 4: Okay. |
| 1: And yeah, she's written— there was a statement thing saying how skinny I was, and I will have an eating disorder, which is why I'm trying to eat more. |
| 2: Okay, so we're looking at— on the right, they have video of— that's the daughter, right? Princess? |
| 1: Yeah. |
| 2: Looking at herself on the phone. And then one of the comments says, "She's too slim. Her arm. Why is Princess wearing heels that look like stripper heels? It was making me feel sick watching her. Dressed like tacky prostitute dolls. The oldest one looks dead behind the eyes. weird ducklings." Okay, wait, they are— they are making fun of her appearance. |
| 1: Yeah. |
| 2: I mean, it's like— I think by— by the standards of internet stuff and the kinds of stuff you will be exposed to if your mom makes you a reality TV star, it's fairly mild, but undeniably, some people were making fun of her appearance. |
| 1: Yeah, so that's the sort of thing people said about Princess. Not something I would kill myself over, but I'm not a 16-year-old girl reading what strangers say about me on the internet. And— |
| 2: Sure, but again, I'm not trying to belabor the point, but why was she reading about stuff strangers said about her on the internet? |
| 1: Right, right. I mean, well, I mean— |
| 2: Although I guess by then she was old enough she could have been on the internet herself. |
| 1: Oh, she was. She was a content creator. |
| 2: Well, but she— but she— sure. Okay, yeah, it's not— look, it's horrible. I don't want to— |
| 1: Yeah. So I wanted to know if the comments that the BBC displayed, if those were representative of what people said about Princess, if they were the worst of it. So I got a text file of every post in the Sophie Mae Dixon threads. This included the posts of her daughters. That was pretty— like, that— like, what they showed on the BBC was pretty much the worst of it. |
| 2: Yeah. |
| 1: What I saw, much more than criticism or hate, was concern. Some of it— like, one read, "Hate to say it, and I want to make it clear it is not the kids' fault," but they're literally, clearly, little slags in the making, crying face emojis. So that was kind of the cruelest sort of stuff, but again, it's, like, mostly directed at the mom. |
| 2: The BBC aired this after the kid killed herself? |
| 1: Yeah. |
| 2: Or before? |
| 1: Yeah. |
| 2: I mean, that's a little ducked up too. The kid kills herself, and then you have the mom saying, "This is why it happened." I didn't watch the whole segment. And then the BBC just— this really, like, uh. |
| 1: Spurs an attack. |
| 2: Spurs the idea that there's a— yeah, which, again, like, yeah, I don't— I don't— well, this was not a good decision on the BBC's part, unless I'm missing something. |
| 1: Right. Right, and on the scale of internet bullying, this did not rank particularly high. |
| 2: Precisely. |
| 1: Yeah. Now, was it Tattle that caused or even contributed to Princess— Princess's death? I don't know. This is under investigation. It's still open. But Sophie Mae Dixon, she publicly named Tattle as the killer, and she was supported in this by Jessica Taylor, who is calling on Parliament to shut this site down. |
| 2: I mean, okay, this is— this is just normal. It's just, like, we saw this in the wake of the Arday stuff. They just do not have the same culture. |
| 1: Right. |
| 2: As our infallible culture of free speech here. |
| 1: So there was another case featured in the BBC show that I wanted to mention. So there was a guy— a British guy named Richard Davies, who was diagnosed with bowel cancer in his 30s. He started posting about this. He became a cancer influencer. He posted about his treatment. He raised money. Some of the Tattle users thought he was a grifter and a liar, and they thought he was misusing the funds, and they straight-up did not believe he was sick. There were a lot of posts on the site about he was faking it. While he was sick and he died, some of them still don't believe it. And his wife said on the BBC show that after he died, she got a card in the mail saying, "Howdy, witch, conning money out of vulnerable people. Karma is a witch." |
| 2: Ugh. That's really weird. |
| 1: Yeah, it's really weird. This is a grooving widow, and some mole is kicking her at the worst moments of her life. It's really weird. But was this particular Tattle user— I don't know. I don't think he or she put their username on the envelope. In the BBC show— |
| 2: Tattle— Tattle sent me, witch. |
| 1: Right. In the BBC show, they implied that this was for sure a Tattle user. No one on Tattle took credit for it. And in fact, Richard Davies appears to have had some enemies, so there were rumors about financial improprieties. To be clear, I have no idea if those rumors are true. As far— as far as I'm aware, no criminal charges were ever filed against him. But six months before he had a Tattle thread, right after he was diagnosed with cancer, there was a report in the news that his house was broken into three times in a week, his things were thrown in a driveway, and then pissed on. |
| 2: A lot of this reminds me how during the Kiwi Farms— peak of the Kiwi Farms brew haha with Kefals, and then with, um, the Liz Fong-Jones stuff is ongoing, and I think we'll discuss it at some point. There were these moments where a figure like Kefals would just be the character of the day on the internet, and then people assumed that anything bad that happened to her. |
| 1: Yes. |
| 2: Came from Kiwi Farms, which is impossible to say. Now, it allows plausible deniability if someone from Kiwi Farms does touch the poo. But in the case of Kefals, like, I had found evidence to suggest it might have been coming from elsewhere that everyone just sort of ignored. |
| 1: Yeah. |
| 2: Like, I think— in other words, I think, like, internet culture reporters and other people who are internet native understand that, like, look, you're the character of the day. A lot of people are going to send horrible tit to you. You can't necessarily pin it on one community however obnoxious that community is. |
| 1: The same thing happens with Patrick Tomlinson, probably the most harassed man on the internet. His, you know, stalkers insist that the doxing and all of the in-person harassment is not coming from the Obie and Anthony forums. Logically, it makes sense that it's coming from these forums, unless you actually know the identity of the person who's doing it and connect it to a username. It's really impossible to tell. And so we don't know if this card sent to this grieving widow was from a toddler or from someone else who hated her husband. Maybe it was from the guy who pissed on his stuff. But it is undoubtedly true that Tattle was a hub of speculation and rumor wrongering about Richard Davies and his cancer. |
| 2: Sure. |
| 1: And when his wife reached out to Sebastian Bond to ask him to take the threads down, she says she never heard back. |
| 2: So does— is that a— Kiwi Farms has a general policy of not taking stuff down when people complain. Does Tattle have that same policy? |
| 1: Yeah, not without a court order. So Sebastian Bond will delete individual posts if they violate the rules, but he told me he really can't delete whole threads at this point because then the people who are trying to get the site shut down can just say whatever they want about it, and there will be no record to check. |
| 2: Gotcha. |
| 1: Now, like I said earlier, Tattle isn't Kiwi Farms. There are moderators. There are rules. But I'm not going to pretend that these sites are— that they're not hurtful. Like, I've seen things about myself on some snark forums that are wildly inaccurate and have hurt my feelings, particularly about my interior design skills. duck you, Kiwi Farms. |
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