Last week in Northern Ireland’s High Court, Mr Justice Colton unmasked the owner of Tattle Life, a website which has become synonymous with online hatred, harassment and doxxing, as Sebastian Bond, also known as Bastian Durward. Bond, a vegan cooking influencer and author of the book Nest and Glow, had been taken to court by Neil and Donna Sands, a Northern Irish couple who were subject to defamation and harassment on the site. It awarded them £300,000 (€351,000) in libel damages, believed to be the largest defamation payout of its kind in Northern Ireland.
Founded in 2018, Tattle Life describes itself as a “commentary website on public business social media accounts”. For all intents and purposes, it’s a gossip forum in the vein of Reddit, with threads on a variety of topics and individuals, which are posted and commented on by its users. But it’s a lucrative one: it was making about £320,000 per year through online advertising.
The official line of the website is that it serves to “allow commentary and critiques of people that choose to monetise their personal life as a business and release it into the public domain”, a version of “if you’re going to put yourself out there, you deserve whatever you get”. The fact that the website’s founder put such a veil of secrecy around his own identity feels both ironic and exactly what you’d expect.
Posters share to the site anonymously – much like Bond himself, who used the pseudonym Helen McDougal to post on the site – expressing grievances they maintain they can’t otherwise.
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But the reality of it is darker. As someone who’s been the subject of several threads on Tattle – some positive, in the “rave about” section, but more negative – I’ve seen first hand the relentless hatred the site facilitates, which is aimed, by and large, at female influencers. Given that women outnumber men in the influencer marketing industry, this is perhaps unsurprising, but even the more prolific male influencers don’t inspire the same feverish vitriol as their female counterparts.
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Though I was, for a time, a journalist, TV and radio personality and social influencer, since 2020 or thereabouts, I’ve written a reader-supported newsletter on Substack, co-presented a podcast with my sister, and posted inconsistently on Instagram, sharing my life in Indiana, where I moved to in March 2020. I’ve had an online presence for almost half of my life, and I’ve been the subject of criticism on the internet for just as long – but it was never quite as nasty as it has been since the dawn of Tattle.
Though a disclaimer on the home page states it has “a zero-tolerance policy to any content that is abusive, hateful or harmful”, Tattle has been the site of some of the most personal attacks I’ve seen. I’ve seen comments about me such as: “She’s next level pathetic, adds no value to society, yet her entitlement knows no bounds”; “it’s only a matter of time before her husband is worn down by her relentless negativity. She really doesn’t contribute anything of note to the family unit”; and “She has to be the laziest person alive”. And this is tame by comparison to what I’ve seen on others’ threads.
There is no common link between posts. These people are not dedicated, for example, to exposing influencers who don’t declare their sponsored content; or to catching out Instagram stars who are lying about what shampoo they use, or which mattress they sleep on. This is not about keeping the internet honest, although that is the lie a lot of them will tell, when pressed.
Instead, the link is one of a kind of insidious, creeping misogyny; never are the users of Tattle Life more incensed than when a woman they follow seems to “fail”, somehow, in her role as a woman. They deride women for hiring cleaners. They are aghast at women whose husbands cook dinner (“what does she even do all day?!”). They are at their most vitriolic when they perceive a woman to be criticising her children or, worse, admonishing them in a tone any more severe than a Mary Poppins sing-song. Threats of calling child protective services are not uncommon.
There’s something bizarre about all of it; by and large, the most common influencer genres are fashion, beauty, wellness and fitness. The achievement of traditional femininity, both aesthetically and in lifestyle terms (marriage, children and the keeping of a tidy home), is never more rewarded than on Instagram and TikTok. But step one perfectly pedicured foot out of place and there is a legion of critics ready to tear you apart.
It’s easy to see what these people get out of it – Tattle provides a place to vent their frustration and irritation with, and even hatred of, influencers who, in their minds, don’t deserve their success or good fortune. But figuring out what they want, beyond finding a sense of camaraderie with other disgruntled social media users, is more complex, and perhaps more importantly, futile.
This week’s news has been remarkably clarifying: here is yet another man profiting from a culture that pits woman against woman
Neil and Donna Sands found legal recourse for their defamation at the hands of Tattle’s users – and in the arduous and costly process brought to light the man behind the site who has profited from the thinly veiled misogyny directed at women with a public platform. Their victory has given hope to the many influencers who would like to see Tattle’s anonymous users unveiled in the same way.
But you’d have to wonder: to what end? Do we really need to know the names of these posters in order to know what kind of people they are?
For me, this week’s news has been remarkably clarifying: here is yet another man profiting from a culture that pits woman against woman, encouraging them to belittle and criticise one another. Instead of seeking to unmask these anonymous posters, perhaps it’s time we directed our focus elsewhere.
Tattle Life nearly broke me. I’ve tried to examine why, exactly, I’ve given anonymous strangers such power – the power to upset me, sure, but also, at times, the power to censor me, to humiliate me, to cause me to second-guess my every online move. In part, I think it’s because a lot of their criticisms – about my work ethic or my body or my relationship – are things I’ve felt about myself, one time or another.
But another aspect of it is that I just want everyone to like me. Discovering the identities of these people won’t change that.
