Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web
Law Students Feel Lasting Effects of Anonymous Attacks

The most prestigious college discussion board in the world.

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 7, 2007; A01

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers.

Though it is difficult to prove a direct link, the woman thinks she is a victim of a new form of reputation-maligning: online postings with offensive content and personal attacks that can be stored forever and are easily accessible through a Google search.

The woman and two others interviewed by The Washington Post learned from friends that they were the subject of derogatory chats on a widely read message board on AutoAdmit, run by a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania and a 23-year-old insurance agent. The women spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution online.

The law-school board, one of several message boards on AutoAdmit, bills itself as "the most prestigious law school admissions discussion board in the world." It contains many useful insights on schools and firms. But there are also hundreds of chats posted by anonymous users that feature derisive statements about women, gays, blacks, Asians and Jews. In scores of messages, the users disparage individuals by name or other personally identifying information. Some of the messages included false claims about sexual activity and diseases. To the targets' dismay, the comments bubble up through the Internet into the public domain via Google's powerful search engine.

The site's founder, Jarret Cohen, the insurance agent, said the site merely provides a forum for free speech. "I want it to be a place where people can express themselves freely, just as if they were to go to a town square and say whatever brilliant or foolish thoughts they have," Cohen said.

The students' tales reflect the pitfalls of popular social-networking sites and highlight how social and technological changes lead to new clashes between free speech and privacy. The chats are also a window into the character of a segment of students at leading law schools. Penn officials said they have known about the site and the complaints for two years but have no legal grounds to act against it. The site is not operated with school resources.

Nor is it the only forum for such discussions, but it may be the largest "and is certainly the highest profile," said David A. Hoffman, a Temple University law professor who has conducted research on AutoAdmit.

Employers, including law firms, frequently do Google searches as part of due diligence checks on prospective employees. According to a December survey by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy research organization, roughly half of U.S. hiring officials use the Internet in vetting job applications. About one-third of the searches yielded content used to deny a job, the survey said. The legal hiring market is very competitive. What could tip the balance is the appearance that a candidate is a lightning rod for controversy, said Mark Rasch, a Washington lawyer and consultant who specializes in Internet issues.

The trend has even spawned a new service, ReputationDefender, whose mission is to search for damaging content online and destroy it on behalf of clients. Generally, the law exempts site operators from liability for the content posted by others, though it does not prevent them from removing offensive items.

"For many people the Internet has become a scarlet letter, an albatross," said Michael Fertik, ReputationDefender's chief executive. The company is launching a campaign to get AutoAdmit to cleanse its site and encourage law schools to adopt a professional conduct code for students.

Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy and free speech advocacy group, said anonymous cyber-writers can be sued for defamation. A judge can require a Web site host or operator to disclose a user's identifying information. Also, he said, the Internet allows those who feel slandered to put forth their own point of view. "The cure to bad speech is more speech," he said.

The chats sometimes include photos taken from women's Facebook pages, and in the Yale student's case, one person threatened to sexually violate her. Another participant claimed to be the student, making it appear that she was taking part in the discussion.

"I didn't understand what I'd done to deserve it," said the student. "I also felt kind of scared because it was someone in my community who was threatening physical and sexual violence and I didn't know who."

The woman e-mailed the site's administrators and asked them to remove the material. She said she received no response. Then she tried contacting Google, which simply cited its policy that the Web site's administrator must remove the material to clear out the search results.

AutoAdmit.com, which also uses the domain name xoxohth.com and which hosts Google-served ads, was launched in 2004. Cohen and his partner, Anthony Ciolli, cite First Amendment ideals. "We are very strong believers in the freedom of expression and the marketplace of ideas . . . and almost never censor content, no matter how abhorrent it may be," they wrote in a posting on someone else's blog. The vast majority of chat threads, they wrote, are school-related. "The only time you'll see 20 or so racist threads on the site is if you proactively search for them."

They said the success of the site's message boards -- they claim 800,000 to 1 million unique visitors a month -- owes to its free, anonymous exchange of ideas. "In fact, one finds overall a much deeper and much more mature level of insight in a community where the ugliest depths of human opinion are confronted, rather than ignored," they wrote.

One chat thread included a sexual joke about a female Holocaust victim.

In another comment, a user said a particular woman had no right to ask that the threads be removed. "If we want to objectify, criticize and [expletive] on [expletive] like her, we should be able to."

In another posting, a participant rejected the idea that photos be removed on moral grounds: "We're lawyers and lawyers-in-training, dude. Of course we follow the law, not morals."

"I definitely don't agree with a lot of the conduct on the board," Ciolli said in an interview. But, he said, only Cohen, who created the message board, has authority to have the comments removed. Cohen, in a separate interview, said he will not "selectively remove" offensive comments, and that when he has attempted to do so, he was threatened with litigation for "perceived inconsistencies."

Another Yale law student learned a month ago that her photographs were posted in an AutoAdmit chat that included her name and graphic discussion about her breasts. She was also featured in a separate contest site -- with links posted on AutoAdmit chats -- to select the "hottest" female law student at "Top 14" law schools, which nearly crashed because of heavy traffic. Eventually her photos and comments about her and other contestants were posted on more than a dozen chat threads, many of which were accessible through Google searches.

"I felt completely objectified," that woman said. It was, she said, "as if they're stealing part of my character from me." The woman, a Fulbright scholar who graduated summa cum laude, said she now fears going to the gym because people on the site encouraged classmates to take cellphone pictures of her.

Ciolli persuaded the contest site owner to let him shut down the "Top 14" for privacy concerns, Cohen said. "I think we deserve a golden star for what we did," Cohen said.

The two men said that some of the women who complain of being ridiculed on AutoAdmit invite attention by, for example, posting their photographs on other social networking sites, such as Facebook or MySpace.

Cohen said he no longer keeps identifying information on users because he does not want to encourage lawsuits and drive traffic away. Asked why posters could not use their real names, he said, "People would not have as much fun, frankly, if they had to worry about employers pulling up information on them."

One woman e-mailed the University of Pennsylvania Law School associate dean, Gary Clinton, in February to ask for his help in persuading Ciolli remove the offensive threads. Clinton told her that since he became aware of AutoAdmit two years ago, he has had "numerous conversations about it" with Penn officials. "I've learned that there appears to be little legal recourse that we have as an institution," he wrote. He said he has had several conversations with Ciolli and has "pointed out time and again how hurtful these ad hominem attacks can be to individuals, and have asked him to delete threads." The effort, he noted, "has been largely unsuccessful."

In a telephone interview, Clinton said the university's position has not changed. "We believe we don't have grounds under the university's code of conduct to proceed," he said.

Law School Deans Speak Out on Web Site Content
Yale, Penn Condemn Anonymous Attacks

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 10, 2007; D02

The deans at two top law schools have admonished the operators of an Internet message board that hosts chats containing personal attacks against female students and racist and homophobic remarks. Letters written by the deans at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania law schools, were issued after an article in The Washington Post aired the debate over AutoAdmit, a message board that was created as a forum to exchange advice on law schools and firms.

The founder of the site, Jarret Cohen, said yesterday that he removed Google ads because "Google has been asking me for awhile about the content" in response to complaints. "I don't want to create a war on multiple fronts," he said. "So I just decided to take [the ads] down."

Though the ads were the site's main source of revenue, Cohen said the site "was not meant to be a cash cow." He said he began running ads eight months ago.

The women who were targeted in some chats had complained to the site owners that the commentary was offensive and false, but they received no relief. Cohen and the site's co-owner, Anthony Ciolli, a third-year law student at Penn, defended AutoAdmit as a forum for free speech.

In an open letter to the "Yale Law School Community," Dean Harold Koh noted that AutoAdmit contained numerous "false and hurtful assertions" by anonymous posters, and that some included names and personal information of Yale students.

Some chats contained claims that women had sexually transmitted diseases. One Yale student, The Post reported, believed that the chat content, which was accessible in a Google search, contributed to her inability to find a summer job.

"Such anonymous, personal attacks on individuals are despicable," Koh wrote. "These malicious attacks, as well as racist, sexist and homophobic speech, have no place in the Yale Law School community."

The Penn law school dean, Michael A. Fitts, and the associate dean, Gary Clinton, posted a letter on the site Thursday, stating that while they understood the right to engage in spirited debate, "we all have a moral and professional obligation to engage in that debate in a responsible manner."

They said that though the university thought it had no basis to act against Ciolli, the derogatory comments could serve as a basis for defamation suits and "may increasingly become the subject of concern by bar admissions committees."

Meanwhile, ReputationDefender, which is representing several women who were targeted on AutoAdmit, has engaged a law firm to explore civil and criminal claims on the women's behalf, ReputationDefender chief executive Michael Fertik said.

Cohen said that he thought the criticism was overblown. "There are far more important things than what everybody's been wasting time complaining about over the past couple of days," he said.