EDITORIAL: THE DISGRACE OF WRITER BEWARE
In the 90’s, when personal computers were still not yet in every household, the internet was virtually the wild wild West. Anyone with a computer and access to the internet could dominate their market. This trend caught on in the business community. Anyone could post negative or false information about their competitors without consequences. This was the birth of cyberbullying.
In time, it trickled down to just about everyone. School children began to use computers, cell phones, etc. to bully their peers.
By 2005, Writer Beware had created a false literary agent named “Miss Snark” who was supposed to be a seasoned professional in New York City. “Miss Snark” was used to “knock” certain businesses and to praise selected businesses. “Miss Snark” and Writer Beware went onto as many web sites as possible to do damage to targeted businesses.. A “googlebomb” or linking strategy was used in order to cause the negative postings to appear in a search engine. The negative postings would appear at the top of the page, and would make it impossible for anyone to find the business’s web site.
By 2006 Writer Beware and their affiliates had made it a practice to make any type of antisocial or terrorist threat without any consequences, claiming “lack of jurisdiction” when accused of bad behavior. An example was a posting about a literary agent on Absolute Write, a Writer Beware affiliate, in which the posters (Jenna Glatzer and MacAlister Stone) were directing their readers to attack him and cut off his genitals. These types of terrorist threats were quite common on the web sites of Absolute Write, Writers Net, Speculations and Writer Beware. In fact they are their customary way of doing business.
At around the same time in 2006, the rest of the world was also engaged in this type of activity, with people creating false identities to harass others. 2006 was the year of the suicide of Megan Meyer, a thirteen-year-old girl who hung herself in her bedroom closet because she had been rejected by a fictitious boy named “Josh Evans,” a creation of her neighbor down the street in her home town in Missouri.
Cyberbullying is now politically incorrect after the famous Tyler Clemente case in New Jersey.
But Writer Beware continues along its merry way, because the law has not yet caught up to them.
Claiming to report literary fraud, (the terminally-ill with Cancer) Ann Crispin and Victoria Strauss and Richard White refused to cover the Charles Petit story when he was accused and punished by an Illinois Court for cheating the John Steinbeck estate because Petit was a frequent contributor (screen name “Jaws”) to blogs at Writer Beware, Absolute Write, Making Light, etc. He was also the attorney for (the terminally-ill with Cancer) Ann Crispin, Victoria Strauss and Jenna Glatzer.
The majority of posters who follow Writer Beware appear to be unpublished authors who have not made the grade, or else fictitious renditions of Strauss, (the terminally-ill with Cancer) Crispin and their spouses…
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