On this week's "Reply All" — how quickly, easily, and thoroughly the Internet can ruin someone.​

Jon Ronson is a journalist, filmmaker, documentarian. He wrote a movie. He's written a couple books that were bestsellers. He's not Kardashian famous, but people know who he is. And people follow him on Twitter. So when he saw a Twitter feed in 2012 with his name, and his face, tweeting nonsense about food, he was pissed.



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At one point, the fake Jon Ronson tweeted the following:



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It was not unreasonable for Jon to worry that people might think it was him tweeting about time and cock, not this Twitter bot. So he found the folks who had set it up. Three academics who refused to take the bot (which they called an "infomorph") down, but agreed to an interview about it. You can watch the video below. It's pretty awkward.

"I posted the video on YouTube and I was expecting people to be mocking me because I'd been so screechy," says Jon. "But like everyone was on my side. Everybody." The comments quickly went from people criticizing the behavior of the Twitter bots creators, to people saying they should be destroyed professionally, or murdered. Jon says someone just commented "gas the cunts."

"And I went from being like thrilled that everyone was on my side," says Jon "to feeling like we were just toddlers crawling towards a gun."

Shortly after the video went live, the academics disabled the twitter bot. By most metrics, that would be considered a win in Jon's corner. But he realized that he had just been party to something that takes place on the Internet all the time — a public shaming. It's the subject of his new book So You've Been Publicly Shamed, where he collects the stories of people whose lives have been ruined by being attacked in public, usually online. And he found that no matter what their transgressions, now that social media gives everyone the opportunity to pile on, their punishments were always much worse than their transgressions. For evidence, one needs look no further than Lindsey Stone.

In 2012, Lindsey Stone was an employee at a Cape Cod based non-profit that helped adults with learning disabilities with independent living. She loved her job. She sang karaoke with them, took them to baseball games, took them on trips — and it was on one of these trips that she took a photo that essentially ruined her life. Lindsey and her best work friend Jamie had a running gag where they would take photos in front of signs essentially doing the opposite of what the sign said. Smoking in front of a no-smoking sign, things like that. And so when they took this photo, they thought it just fit neatly into their oeuvre:



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It's a dumb joke, one that some might think is in poor taste, but they were just posting it to their Facebook pages. To this day, Lindsey has no real idea how it ended up there, but a month or so after the picture was posted, someone sent it to a pro-military website. Before she knew it, she was being shouted at from all corners of the Internet.

A Facebook group called "Fire Lindsay Stone" had 10,000 likes in just a couple days. Her address and phone number ended up online. Her phone rang off the hook. News vans showed up at her house. Within days of the photo's arrival online, she was fired from her job. Lindsey stopped leaving her house, but she was unable to stop checking up on the people who hated her.

"I got sucked into that routine of wanting to check up on myself," says Lindsey. "There were quite a few nights where it was hard to sleep. And even when I wasn't online checking up on myself, just thinking, you know, worrying about what direction my life was going to take, if I would ever have a job opportunity. If I would ever be able to move forward, you know?"

Even after she got a new job working with children with autism, she lived in constant fear. People seemed to recognize she loved the work she did, but whenever she was praised, her next thought was "what if they Google me?"

Jon reached out to Lindsey several times, but never heard back from her. At least, not until he gave her an incentive to respond: hundreds of thousands of dollars of free reputation management.

If you've never heard of reputation management, you aren't alone. Jon had never heard of it either when he started writing this book, but then he stumbled onto the story of a guy named named Graeme Wood. Graeme set up a Google alert for an old classmate named Phineas Upham after Phineas and his mother were arrested on tax evasion charges. His mother quickly paid a fine, and all of the charges against Phineas were dropped. Graeme forgot about them. And he also forgot to disable his Google Alert.

A while later, Graeme started getting new, bizarre Google Alerts about Phineas. An article about Phineas being appointed the "Head Finance Curator of Venture Cap Monthly," and being voted philanthropist of the month by "Charity News Forum." But when he went to these sites, he found that they barely looked legitimate. Phineas Upham had engaged a reputation manager.

The way that Google works, in theory, is simple. If I have a website, the more people that link to my website, the higher it goes in the Google search results. So reputation managers can rehab a person's online imprint by creating a mountain of information about them, and linking all of it together. If they can push the bad stuff off the first page, they're generally in good shape. According to a study by the online ad network Chitika, 33% of Googlers only click on the first link. And it just gets worse from there. Almost no one continues on to the second page.

The biggest company in the world of online reputation management is called Reputation.com. Jon brought Reputation.com and Lindsey Stone together, and used a combination of articles that were sympathetic to Lindsey and websites made by reputation.com to drive all the negative stuff about her off the front page of Google. The "Fire Lindsey Stone" Facebook page is now nowhere to be found, but another Facebook page, "Hire Lindsey Stone" is the second result for a search on Lindsey Stone. And then, of course, there are the pages that Reputation.com made. Pages like lindseymstone.com which is a seemingly endless, almost pictureless website dedicated to "promot[ing] awareness of autism spectrum disorders and support the research and outreach efforts of domestic and international organizations."



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Reputation.com doesn't take clients who have committed violent or sexual crimes, or committed fraud. They also don't put up any websites that contain falsehoods. there are a lot of companies that do. that will work to fix the Google results of convicted murderers, sex offenders, etc. And that's why, to me this, whole reputation management world feels anti-democratic, or even wrong. It feels like you're manipulating a public resource. That Google's search results are supposed to reflect the world as it is. Reputation.com's CEO Michael Fertik says I'm being totally naive.

"The biggest myth about Google is they're somehow the first amendment," says Fertik. "That there's a natural order of things of how Google presents stuff that is inevitable, inexorable and correct. That whatever floats to the top of Google deserves to be there."

Michael thinks, as a rule of thumb, that Google can work great, but only when you're talking about people or subjects that have been discussed over a long period of time by many, many people. "With George Bush, Barack Obama, cancer, climate change, Google probably does a pretty good job," Michael says. "For almost every topic under the sun, that is not true."

One of the best things about the Internet is its seeming permanence. I can, with a couple keystrokes, look at the front page of the New York Times website from 1997, or connect the BBS I used to hang out on in the early 90's, or check out single serving sites from the early 2000's like zombo.com or hamsterdance. But it is that same permanence that can reduce a person's entire life to one moment — one image, one sentence. Jon Ronson would argue that Lindsey Stone wasn't undone by a poorly received joke. She was undone by us. By our desire to do good in the form of piling on. By our righteous outrage. A desire made much easier by the Internet, where we never have to look the people we're tearing apart in the face, and their transgressions live forever.