I found this article in the Sunday Time today. Does anyone have a subscription to perhaps post some excerpts from the article. I see Josefiens's friend, Em Sheldon mentioned, but cannot read further as I don't subscribe. Let's see what they are complaining about.
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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 parliamentâs digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) select committee, Em Sheldon, an influencer with 117,000 Instagram followers, raised the topic of dark online forums. âThese women are saying that they are just giving you constructive criticism,â she said. âBut unfortunately, they are all hyping each other up and saying, âLetâs report her to this person. Letâs do this, letâs do that.ââ
Designed to house âcommentary and critiquesâ of those who âchoose to monetise their personal life as a business and release it into the public domainâ, Tattle Lifeâs 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.
âShe canât even hold a paintbrush properly, itâs no wonder it looks like a pile of
tit,â wrote Libbub, a âVIPâ 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. âIâm embarrassed for her.â
Solomonâs brush with DIY attracted 1,000 comments in the space of ten days. âShe hasnât even sanded the wood down ... sheâs such a messy c***,â suggested dumdums83. âMaybe she should stick to showering instead of DIY,â was the advice of another member.
Tattle Lifeâs 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. âShoes might have a lift, but heâs still married to the kween of griftâ is the name for thread 124 of the 125 dedicated to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. âHer face is the only thing with more revisions than Finding Freedom!â 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 âcommentary and critiquesâ.
âIt goes way beyond kind of bitchy comments ... Itâs something dangerous, darker, deeper,â she says. On top of the digs about her appearance and speculation about her mental health, romantic relationships and family, sheâs 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. âShe deserves everything sheâs going to get,â it read. âI was so scared and paranoid,â recalls Barry. Tattle Life users have also shared pieces of information about her that she hasnât put online, such as a link to her house when it was up for sale â an act known as âdoxingâ.
Barry suspects that the majority of those posting about her on Tattle Life are female â an estimated 84% of her Instagram audience are women. âIâve never ever thought about a man being on Tattle bitching about me,â she says. Commenters notice the tiniest things, such as the shampoo she uses or how much money sheâs 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 âInside Tattle Life: Exclusive interview with the founderâ, Helen McDougal is named as the siteâs originator. She is quoted as saying that the motivation for the forumâs creation was influencers âbrazenly breaking the guidelines for advertsâ in posts where they were paid to promote brands or products. According to the Advertising Standards Authority, an influencerâs paid-for content should be immediately identifiable as an advert.
In the Lime Goss interview, McDougal says: âOf course itâs a gossip site, so weâre not going to take the moral high ground. Some messages are bitchy, but they arenât hateful, abusive or threatening.â
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 ânew online safety laws will ensure that sites like Tattle Life are held to account for what happens on their platformsâ, which will face fines of up to â10% of global turnoverâ if they fail to keep people âsafe and tackle abuseâ.
âIâve had nothing but relentless abuse, bullying, harassment, discrimination even doxing from this forum,â writes Chapman alongside her petition. âBullying can lead to suicide. Is that what itâs going to take before [it] gets removed?â
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. Tattles rules are already far stricter than these will be !
If you donât look, you donât know because none of us are putting anything on their social media, so how exactly do they know unless theyâre stalking about on here? Itâs for us, not for you.
