Every nefarious organisation needs its shadowy leader — the secretive intelligence behind the collective madness, the Wizard to this particular Oz. QAnon has “Q”, the author of the “Q drops” which laid out a sprawling fantasy of child abusers at the heart of the American deep state. The Zizians (a group of extremist rationalists implicated in several murders) have “Ziz”, who for several years was assumed to be dead. And Tattle Life has “Helen McDougal”.
“Helen McDougal” is the suspiciously normie name adopted by the founder and operator of Tattle, a message board that acts as a dark mirror to influencer culture. If the currency of influencer culture is likes, then the currency of Tattle is hate. The users of Tattle follow the objects of their attention every bit as avidly as a fan would — dissecting relationships, speculating about what’s going on behind the camera, and tracking influencers’ movements. The difference is that on Tattle, this is all animated by a fundamental loathing of the people they obsess over. It is the home of anti-fandom, of communities formed in antipathy.
According to Tattle’s own description, it’s a “commentary website on public business social media accounts” that allows “commentary and critiques of people that choose to monetise their personal life as a business and release it into the public domain”, but has a “zero-tolerance policy to any content that is abusive, hateful or harmful”. According to Tattle’s subjects, this is humbug: Tattle is a factory for libel and harassment, and its favourite targets (like its users) are women. Comments like “play dough arse”, “prime example of disordered eating” and “looks like a sofa” are the norm.
Last week, a libel judgement from the High Court in Belfast was published which confirmed the worst about Tattle. Originally issued in 2023, but subject to reporting restrictions until now, the judgement called Tattle “a site which has been set up to facilitate the deliberate infliction of hurt and harm on others. Its very nature is to allow anonymous trashing of people’s reputations and the people facilitating this are making money out of it… This is clearly a case of peddling untruths for profit.”
The couple who had sued Tattle, Neil and Donna Sands, were awarded £300,000 in damages. But perhaps even more gratifyingly, they were now able to reveal the true identity of “Helen McDougal” — not, in fact, an ordinary woman who wanted to blow the whistle on the corruption of influencers, but a man called Sebastian Bond. Bond is an influencer himself, promoting “healthy plant based recipes” under the name Nest and Glow. The next step for the Sands and other Tattle targets will be to identify individual posters and bring them to court in turn. Their ultimate aim would be to shut the site down, either by direct order or simply by making it too expensive to run.
The layers here are certainly tastier than the cursed slop posing as food that Bond puts up on his Instagram account. The scourge of influencers turns out to be an influencer. The person behind the internet’s fiercest criticisms of fakes and phonies turns out to be a fake and phony of the first order. And the Tattle users, who take great delight in “doxxing” online personalities (that is, finding and releasing personal documents or information), are now anxiously checking their own opsec, fearful of having their cover blown.
Best of all, though, is the gender reveal. How better to cloak yourself in benignity than by pretending to be a woman? “Helen McDougal” gave automatic protection against charges of misogyny — yes, Tattle might be furiously engaged in the character assassination of any female in the public eye, but it was a female-founded site with majority female users! The latter statement is still true (probably), but there’s a different vibe to it now we know they were all acting in a space owned and controlled by a man.
Not that Tattle’s users ought to be surprised by this act of mendacity. One of the busiest topics on the site is “Gender Discussion” — “Where men & women are born, not worn”, as one poster puts it. The idea that a man would adopt a female persona for deceptive purposes should be very familiar to people who think like this. Tattle is one part of the internet that never got the #bekind memo, and as a result it settled, from early on, into a bracingly realist approach on trans issues.
Even though the site was founded only in 2018, it feels like a portal to an older, more anarchic version of the internet than the manicured lawns of the social networks. One of the first things you’ll notice if you look at Tattle is that it’s ugly. That’s not just in terms of its content, but aesthetically: Tattle is a wall of sans serif text. When threads read 1,000 posts, they’re automatically closed and the conversation has to migrate to a new thread. Navigating them requires much patient clicking to find out what people are talking about.
You might assume this is a fault with the site — shouldn’t a message board want to be accessible to the maximum number of potential users? Actually, I think it’s a feature. Tattle’s jankiness means it takes commitment to participate. The friction-free UX of Instagram, X or Bluesky means that anyone can join in; on Tattle, though, you have to learn the rules of engagement before you can be in the club. Membership is also restricted. According to posters on Reddit, it hasn’t been open to new signups for several years.
That makes Tattle a closed world subject to its own mores. Crucially, though, it’s a closed world that’s visible from the outside. If all the posters on Tattle wanted to do was trash-talk influencers, they could do that on WhatsApp: the appeal of Tattle is being able to do it where people, including the people they’re talking about, can see. On Tattle threads, you’ll routinely see a comment that imagines how the subject would feel if they were reading — or even better, relishing the fact that the subject has angrily acknowledged Tattle’s existence elsewhere.
That kind of behaviour tells you a lot about Tattle’s complicated relationship to celebrity. “Of course it is a gossip site, so we’re not going to take the moral high ground,” said McDougal/Bond in a Q&A from before his outing. But the truth is that Tattle does consistently take the moral high ground: its justification for its existence is that influencers engage in unethical practices, and this ought to be exposed. And as far as it goes, there’s some truth to this.
Influencers do behave in sketchy ways — not flagging ads, promoting unethical products or lying about results — and neither regulators nor the platforms have the resources or appetite to keep up with this. Beyond the legally dubious, there are influencers who promote dangerous health crazes, who exploit their children or who manifest troubling behaviours that their audiences enable. Users of Tattle might also look at the coverage of their site in places like Mail Online (which called Bond the “king of trolls”) and point out that this is hardly an outlet with clean hands when it comes to publishing nasty commentary.
An amateur influencer watchdog could fill a significant gap, if that was what truly Tattle was. Instead, Tattle is a machine for laundering resentment toward people who are good at engagement. “You want attention?” goes the implicit argument of a Tattle post. “Well, here’s some attention that you don’t get to control.” The best revenge of all? It elevates the posters themselves to micro-celebrities in the ecosystem of the site. They get all the pleasure of name-recognition, and all the satisfaction of shaping public opinion, while being able to keep their names safely detached from the lives they want to protect. As gratifying as the unmasking of Bond might be, it hasn’t so far seemed to herald the end of Tattle, or a demise of trolling culture overall.
In his Q&A as McDougal, Bond pointed out that “If Tattle ever did shut down, another site would pop up in seconds to fill the void and several others already exist.” He was telling the truth about that much, even if his entire identity was a fiction. Bitterness, cruelty and a desire to bond against an enemy are powerful human impulses. So is the urge to claw your way into the limelight — even if only pseudonymously, and even if you have to do it at the expense of the people who are already there.
No one cares as fiercely about fame as those who wish they had some of it, which is why it feels inevitable that the person behind Tattle would turn out to be a wannabe food blogger. But no one understands the brutality of fame as well as a hater, which is why it makes sense that Bond protected his privacy so carefully. The heart of Tattle was Bond’s understanding that loathing could bring people together. Now his name is public, Bond can finally become everything he envied and everything he feared.
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Author: Sarah Ditum
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