UC San Diego

This dissertation analyzes the legal, social, and architectural dimensions of three sets of platform-specific reputational disputes in order to understand how people negotiate the reputational impact of personally critical speech. The cases involve individuals criticized on nominal “consumer review” websites, bloggers writing as “professional-amateur” journalists, and crowd-sourced criminal investigations on the social media platform Reddit.

Techno-utopian optimism about the decline of traditional media gatekeepers has given way to widespread lament over the apparent vulnerability of our “online reputations.” Such lament is steeped in a thoroughly neoliberal conception of increased personal responsibility to protect one’s reputation as an exchangeable asset. This perceived imperative has prompted several responses.

Some call for the law to afford greater control over the speech of others. Such calls challenge the conventional wisdom in First Amendment theory that “counterspeech” is the preferred remedy for critical speech that is not false or egregiously invasive. Yet efforts to compel search engines to de-index links or impose greater liability on platform operators for third-party speech are largely legal and political dead ends in the U.S. More vexing are some emergent combinations of law and private action that have conflicting implications within theories of free speech and democracy. The search engine optimization tactics of the “reputation management” industry often obviate litigation through direct counterspeech. My case studies demonstrate that some of its efforts achieve the kind of non-judicial resolution of reputational disputes that legal reformers have sought for decades.

On the other hand, reputation managers and their clients routinely use “reputational” concerns as a rhetorical pretext for silencing an expanded range of critical speech than is traditionally actionable. Reputation management thus simultaneously embodies a broader reactionary ethos regarding public discussion. This ethos is at odds with liberal speech norms that valorize the cacophony of competing views and the promotion of “republican virtue” when citizens collectively confront troubling ideas or sentiments. Ultimately, the paradox of reputation management demonstrates how the neoliberal imperative to fashion oneself as a “brand” perhaps threatens robust public discussion as much as overly stringent libel and privacy laws would.