HOUSTON – A website with the sole purpose of offering a space to leave anonymous comments about every Facebook and Twitter user joins a growing field of trash-talking sites.
The website abouteveryone.com is simply a white screen with the name and a box where users paste a link to a person's social media account and then can immediately start commenting away. AboutEveryone uses the social media link to pull in a person's actual Facebook or Twitter picture and like and dislike button to create the profile.
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Regardless, of what is said on abouteveryone.com, the web owner is not liable for any of it under the Federal Communication Decency Act.
Local 2 noticed a page on the website offering to take down the profile for a price. The next day, the button to that page disappeared.
Tech writer Tony Bradley told Local 2 the comments page looked suspicious. Some comments have thousands and thousands of likes and dislikes, and some comments are repeated on several different profiles.
"It seems odd there are 1,000 and sometimes 6,000 comments 'liking' one profile and on a site nobody's really heard about. There is software out there that can make up names and comments, and these just sort of look like names that aren't real people," said Bradley, writer of PC World's Net Work blog.
Attorney Hank Fasthoff told Local 2 if it turns out the owner of abouteveryone.com is auto-generating or republishing comments on multiple profiles and then trying to get people to pay to have them removed, that would be extortion.
"If that is the case, then, yes, that is a criminal act. It seems to me that AboutEveryone is a site that cowards would go to post things about somebody," said Fasthoff.
Bradley told Local 2 if people find their profiles on the website the best thing to do would be to contact Twitter or Facebook and ask them to block the website from accessing their profiles.