As anyone with a social media account knows, a price we pay for being able to share our thoughts with a global audience is being open to insults and abuse in reply. People with a prominent online presence, such as influencers and vloggers, attract attacks through making more of their lives available for comment. The messaging forum Tattle Life has threads about various influencers where opinions about them can be posted anonymously. One subject of a thread is GK Barry, who has branched out from running a sex-themed podcast into other media, now including presenting a documentary about Tattle Life for the BBC. GK Barry: Toxic Gossip starts with Barry reading some of the puerile slights written about her on the website, with other people having been victim to worse abuse. She speaks with loved ones of two people who had a presence on Instagram. Richard Davies ran the ‘bowelbro’ video diary of his struggle with cancer, which posters on Tattle Life accused of being faked, even after his death. Princess Dickson took her own life aged 16 after insulting comments about her appearance were repeatedly made on the forum. Her mother, Sophie, and Lisa, Richard Davies’ widow, tried to contact Tattle Life’s moderators about the messages and their impact, with no response.
Tattle Life was launched in 2018, and for many years its owner wasn’t known publicly. In 2023, entrepreneurs Donna and Neil Sands began legal proceedings against the website, claiming libel, harassment and breach of privacy, with the defendant’s identity not disclosed to the Sands. So, they hired a private investigator who discovered the person behind Tattle Life to be Sebastian Bond, later revealed in the press. Before Tattle Life, Bond ran a blog about veganism, whose demise, suggests Barry, made him jealous of other people’s success as influencers. Tattle Life now has nearly 375,000 registered users, with millions more people who just browse its threads. They aren’t only an audience for gossipy messages but also the adverts cluttering up the site. These have generated around £1 million in advertising revenue, according to the documentary. As Lisa says regarding the thread about her husband ‘the footfall to those pages was immense, and for them, that’s money’. So, it is in the site’s financial interest to have contentious threads.
Unfortunately, slurs grab the attention in a more immediate way than a reasoned critique does. It’s doubtful that those who post the most offensive messages on Tattle Life’s threads would repeat them face-to-face with their target. Communicating virtually and anonymously enables people to stir up trouble and cause upset without any personal comeback. Tattle Life’s defenders would say that it holds influencers to account and upholds free speech. In the abstract, this sounds reasonable, but in the real / virtual worlds the context shapes the matter. ‘Free speech’ in capitalism is defined by a legal framework which reflects the prerogatives of the status quo. As Tattle Life is a business, there is a separation between who owns the platform and who uses it, which complicates who owns and is responsible for the content posted there. Even when laws aim to prevent or protect victims, they are only attempts to patch up a system which encourages such problems as defamation and threats. The need to make money is, as always, a factor; here, represented by the site’s income from hosting adverts, which can increase if shocking content attracts more viewers. That a supposed platform for free speech has been mired in secrecy and is driven by money is one of the consequences of the market system.
Recruiting Barry to present a documentary about Tattle Life and the realm of influencers comes across as an attempt by the BBC to court the younger demographic more likely to be scrolling through social media than watching TV. According to Ofcom’s 2025 Media Nations report, only 45 percent of people aged between 16 and 24 switch on any broadcast television in an average week. GK Barry: Toxic Gossip comes across like a primer to introduce this cohort to the documentary format. It follows the usual template of interviews with victims and experts, text of quotes, facts and figures, and the presenter poring over screens between their segments of spiel. Each component is brief so everything fits into the show’s half-hour running time, and perhaps the audience’s expected attention span. Where the format requires a confrontation with the villain of the piece, it ends up as looking quite desperate. The narrative through the programme is Barry’s search for Bond, which includes tracing a location from details in a photo and speaking with his previous neighbours, and culminates with Barry sitting in a car outside his parents’ house and then delivering a letter to them. She doesn’t receive a response from Bond, although Tattle Life’s moderator says ‘for the BBC to include door-stepping harassment of pensioners in the documentary is abhorrent’ in a statement on the forum. They add ‘almost all articles on Tattle Life are misinformation and heavily biased by influencers and their PR who wish to shut down all opinions they dislike’ .
Tattle Life is just one website, which reflects wider issues with the culture of online communication. Social media platforms are run to make money for their owners, who are distanced from those who use or are affected by them. This is built into how they need to operate, which the legal framework tries to facilitate. Ideals of ‘free speech’ have to fit in with this context. The motivation to post ‘toxic gossip’ doesn’t come from social media itself, but from how people are socialised. Having the kind of mindset to want to do this is a result of living in an alienating, divisive environment: hurling insults is an attempt to express some power when someone has little else in their lives. The impact of online abuse on people already vulnerable can be devastating, as the documentary illustrates.
Mike Foster
