On July 24, 2014, Kathleen Hale approached STGRB with interview questions pertaining to online bullying and our site. Below is the Q&A that resulted from that interview.
What reasons did you have for building this site?
We started our site two years ago when we noticed a certain gang of Goodreads friends (later termed the GR bullies) who formed organized attacks on authors on Goodreads. These were usually authors who had unknowingly broken some kind of “rule” (rules made up purely by the Goodreads bullies) and were labeled BBA. It would usually begin with the author getting verbally attacked by the gang who would swarm in and back the author into a corner. Then, this gang would attack the author’s books on both Goodreads and Amazon, leaving either nasty one-star reviews or derogatory shelving or both. They would also hunt the author down on other platforms like the author’s personal website or Facebook page. Afterwards, the attackers would blog about the author and begin what we call the “career destroying” phase, making it known that this was an author whom they did not support and would encourage anyone they knew to boycott their books. What we also found was that most of the bullies were fairly ordinary people who were following the lead of a few unbalanced individuals, not realizing that they don’t really know these online ‘friends’ well, but the activity has attracted a small number of obsessive stalkers who seek out new victims regularly in a demonstratively pathological need to harm others. These few individuals will actually bait authors online to get them to say something, anything, that can be taken out of context so that they can instigate the larger group to swoop in for mass attacks. Because this online gang warfare largely went unnoticed and unchecked, especially by the Goodreads management, we began our blog to monitor and document what was happening in order to educate the public and warn others.
Do you still get complaints from people about Goodreads? If so, how many per month, and what is the nature of the complaints?
Yes, we do. We used to get dozens per month when we started our blog. Now we get maybe one or two per month.
Do you recognize the name Blythe Harris?
Yes, we sure do. Blythe Harris was involved in an attack on a fourteen year old girl back in May of 2012. Blythe, who is an eighth grade teacher, and another GR bully named Archer Adam Pring, ganged up on this girl when the girl commented on Blythe’s review of a book. Both GR bullies proceeded to curse the girl out, telling her to f*** off multiple times. You can read about it here:
https://stopthegrbullies.com/2013/01/30/bully-reviews/
In what ways has Goodreads become a platform for bullying?
In conjunction with the Amazon fora, Goodreads IS the platform that started the online phenomenon known as review bullying. Goodreads management practiced an extreme laissez-faire policy when it came to their members. They allowed them to harass and bully authors with very little or no penalty. As a result, vicious gangs formed and authors could get bullied right off of GR for doing very little to nothing, even for just being friends with the wrong person. In 2012, the situation was so bad, we decided to start our blog to help stop the abuse. In two years, it has gotten better, but we are still fighting this problem of online abuse towards authors. These gangs still exist and they have spread to other platforms like BookLikes and KBoards. The best thing we can do now is just educate and warn others about the dangers that exist for all authors out there in the cyber world.
When you say “dangers that exist for all authors out there in the cyber world,” what do you mean exactly? What have you seen happen to bullied authors? And In what ways is this particular kind of bullying particularly nasty? Do you think it would be enough to drive a person crazy?
We’ve seen authors get death and rape threats. That was on Goodreads. Many are hounded relentlessly online, stalked both online and physically, and have had their private information published that led to them being called in their home and threatened. We have many of these incidents documented on our blog. It’s not uncommon for some authors to become severely depressed from being harassed or even have thoughts of suicide. So, yes, it can really drive a person crazy, especially sensitive people like authors.
