Beautiful houses, chic summer dresses, cutesy videos of grinning families. The job of a social media influencer is to make life look like something out of a dream, one that followers can aspire to emulate.
Yet there is another corner of the internet, far away from perfect Instagram accounts, dedicated to tearing apart that dream, skewering its architects and critiquing their every move.
Welcome to Tattle Life, an online gossip forum and seriously hateful website.
You may never have heard of it, but it has thousands of users. Last week in front of parliament’s digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) select committee, Em Sheldon, an influencer with 117,000 Instagram followers, raised the topic of dark online forums. “These women are saying that they are just giving you constructive criticism,” she said. “But unfortunately, they are all hyping each other up and saying, ‘Let’s report her to this person. Let’s do this, let’s do that.’”
Designed to house “commentary and critiques” of those who “choose to monetise their personal life as a business and release it into the public domain”, Tattle Life’s Wild-West discussion boards operate similarly to those of the website Reddit. Millions of comments, often posted under a cloak of online anonymity, pick apart everything from parenting skills to personal hygiene. In-page adverts power the business model. In the week that England footballers criticised Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for allowing hate and abuse to proliferate on their platforms, here exists a website seemingly designed to foster unpleasantness, and is one we appear powerless to hold to account.
“She can’t even hold a paintbrush properly, it’s no wonder it looks like a pile of tit,” wrote Libbub, a “VIP” Tattle Life member on a thread about Stacey Solomon, one-time finalist on The X Factor, as she documented her home renovations to her 4.6 million Instagram followers. “I’m embarrassed for her.”
Solomon’s brush with DIY attracted 1,000 comments in the space of ten days. “She hasn’t even sanded the wood down ... she’s such a messy c***,” suggested dumdums83. “Maybe she should stick to showering instead of DIY,” was the advice of another member.
Tattle Life’s design is simple: a user, identifiable by a screen name, creates a thread about an individual, and the commenters pile in to pick apart the person on trial and their latest posts.
The majority of comments are negative in nature, ranging from acerbic and critical to more aggressive. Some are just a sentence, others several paragraphs. Each thread can contain up to a thousand of them before it is locked and a new one must be created in order for the gossiping to go on. There are 35 threads about Solomon alone, totalling more 34,000 pronouncements on her life.
Their titles are creative, often rhyming. “Shoes might have a lift, but he’s still married to the kween of grift” is the name for thread 124 of the 125 dedicated to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. “Her face is the only thing with more revisions than Finding Freedom!” reads number 101.
The bulk of those targeted are considerably less well-known than Harry and Meghan. Eimear Varian Barry, 34, has had 5,000 comments aimed at her. Her Instagram account, which has 96,500 followers, is a curation of wholesome, sunny photos of a blonde mother with her dogs and her three young children. She says what is posted on Tattle Life extends further than “commentary and critiques”.
“It goes way beyond kind of bitchy comments ... It’s something dangerous, darker, deeper,” she says. On top of the digs about her appearance and speculation about her mental health, romantic relationships and family, she’s been accused of child abuse for posting content involving her children. She says the relentless character assassination has led her to feel suicidal.
One comment in particular, posted last May, prompted the first of three trips to the police, who have opened a file but not taken things further. “She deserves everything she’s going to get,” it read. “I was so scared and paranoid,” recalls Barry. Tattle Life users have also shared pieces of information about her that she hasn’t put online, such as a link to her house when it was up for sale — an act known as “doxing”.
Barry suspects that the majority of those posting about her on Tattle Life are female — an estimated 84% of her Instagram audience are women. “I’ve never ever thought about a man being on Tattle bitching about me,” she says. Commenters notice the tiniest things, such as the shampoo she uses or how much money she’s spent on beauty products.
So who is behind it? Tattle Life first appeared in 2017 and is, it says, owned and operated by a separate site, Lime Goss, a blog that hosts unattributed news-style articles about influencers and public figures. In an article on Lime Goss titled “Inside Tattle Life: Exclusive interview with the founder”, Helen McDougal is named as the site’s originator. She is quoted as saying that the motivation for the forum’s creation was influencers “brazenly breaking the guidelines for adverts” in posts where they were paid to promote brands or products. According to the Advertising Standards Authority, an influencer’s paid-for content should be immediately identifiable as an advert.
In the Lime Goss interview, McDougal says: “Of course it’s a gossip site, so we’re not going to take the moral high ground. Some messages are bitchy, but they aren’t hateful, abusive or threatening.”
Many disagree. A petition on Change.org to shut down Tattle Life started by Michelle Chapman, a YouTuber who goes by the name of Mummy Chelle, has 61,325 signatures.
As the government comes under increasing pressure to tackle problems of trolling, hate and abuse online, it has prepared a draft Online Safety Bill, which aims to place new duties on social media firms and online platforms to remove harmful or illegal content. Under the bill, social media companies would face multi-billion-pound fines for failing to remove harmful or illegal content.
The DCMS said that the “new online safety laws will ensure that sites like Tattle Life are held to account for what happens on their platforms”, which will face fines of up to “10% of global turnover” if they fail to keep people “safe and tackle abuse”.
“I’ve had nothing but relentless abuse, bullying, harassment, discrimination even doxing from this forum,” writes Chapman alongside her petition. “Bullying can lead to suicide. Is that what it’s going to take before [it] gets removed?”
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Yes having found this site and reading about the ebay zimmerman dupe debacle... I felt as if she was trolling TL.... Posts... The corset style dresses reminds me of that woman from RHONY who used to be in the bar shouting turtle time...?... Good for selfridges I say... Would you want to buy a dress her face was smeared on?... She probably had to pay for her food/drink last time she was at the roof restaurant.... So now it's payback... 
..... Oh and I definitely didn't need to see the areola showing through in that organza paly suit.... 
