More Scandals

While I was dropping my Entrecards last night, I came across another scandal in the blogging community on Turnip of Power about Monkey Tales. Good lord. It doesn’t end there, either. While I remember Monkey Tales, from dropping cards on his site, to accepting his ads on mine (hey, I’ll take those Entrecard credits off your hands for you!), I never really read his site. It seems he’s been stealing entries from someone else for quite a while.

This brings me back to dishonesty online. I don’t care if Blogger A’s real name is Tom, Dick or Harry, but I do expect a certain level of honesty online. Own up to your words, don’t steal your content and don’t lie. It all comes down to the same thing: People have too much freedom online.

While I was looking into this further, I came across another issue: Cyberstalking. Ok, stop rolling your eyes! It seems some people have had worse troubles than I have had with stalkers online. There’s always so much worse people can do than start fake blogs pretending to not be themselves to insult you. Of course I feel for Nicole. The first cyberstalker/harasser I had was just as vicious as the ones she posts about. When I would not confess to the lies they posted about me or tried to bully my friends into believing, he opened accounts all over the internet in my name and made ‘confessions’ of his own. I knew who did it when he purchased domains in his full, legal name. Her story isn’t really unique, but it’s awful all the same.

I wonder how all these things happen? My story happened because I discovered a man (pretending to be a woman) had archived all of my entries on a subdomain of his site. I emailed him and asked for my archives to be removed. He emailed me back, apologising profoundly, and said the site belonged to someone who had emailed him and asked for webspace, but he was going to tell them to remove the content immediately. A week later, everything was still there, and I noticed the IP of the man I’d emailed matched a series of hits I was receiving nearly every couple of hours. When I emailed him back and confronted him about this, he went nuts. He accused me of murdering his wife (from states away) and put up a memorial to her on the site. Except….the photos of her were of me! I was amazed because at the time, I didn’t have the resources to put my photos online. Yes, I contacted the police, but they were virtually useless. Over the years, it’s become a memory to me. It was important at 21 when I thought this person could interfere with my real life, such as school and getting custody of my daughter, but it turns out they only had control over my life because I was letting them. I let it go. There was no big ceremony, there was no revelation. It just ended. Probably because I dropped it. At the time, I spent hundreds of dollars on domain registrations, hundreds of man-hours writing abuse letters getting virtually thousands of bogus sites in my name shut down, and I was only 21 years old. The person behind that was about 40. He invented fictional people to post nasty things about me. It was a mess.

I wonder if in seven years, these people will think this was all worth it?

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