START 032PHOTOGRAPHY:CHRISTOPHERMERTZhen Dennis Timand Clemmensen’s
14-year-old daughter, Silke, became
withdrawn and stopped wanting to go
to school, he did what many parents in
his circumstances would do, and went
online. Pulling up Google, he searched for his daughter’s
name. “I don’t remember exactly what the guys from her
school were saying,” he tells me. “But it was something like,
‘She’s a hooker, she’ll go to bed with everybody’.” Abusive
messages appeared on Facebook and Instagram.
He was instantly alarmed. “I’d seen some girls had committed
suicide because of the bad things that had been written about
them on the internet, and I thought, ‘This isn’t
good. I want to prevent this’.” So Clemmensen,
who is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, called his
childhood friend, William Atak, who runs Atak
A/S – a search engine optimisation and reputation
management firm also in Copenhagen. Companies
turn to Atak when they want unflattering infor-
mation pushed down Google’s search results.
It is controversial work, especially if you believe
that the internet should be open, transparent and
not manipulated by PR consultants – but there
is certainly a market for Atak’s particular skillset.
Atak helped Clemmensen get the offending
material offline. First, he used keyword analysis to surface
the webpages on which Silke was being written about, and
then his team contacted the webmasters and got the content
taken down. It was a favour for a friend. Hoowever, the incident
caused Atak to wonder: what if there was a broader market
for his skills than corporate executives? He remembered a
conversation he’d had with a client in 2013, who had come to
him to get negative publicity pushed down Google results. Atak
had obliged. Then, the client asked for some sort of guarantee
that the buried results wouldn’t surface again. “I told him
you can never be 100 per cent sure,” Atak says. They agreed
upon a monthly retainer – a sort of insurance product – so
that if the content reappeared, Atak would remove it again.
Now Atak plans to introduce one of the first products of
its kind – an anti-cyberbullying and revenge porn insurance
that will provide security for bullied teenagers and protection
from jilted ex-partners. Since 2015, Atak’s firm has offeredthis as an employee benefit to companies it works with, in
partnership with insurance provider AIG, but he plans to roll
it out as a direct-to-consumer product within the next year. It
will, he says, cover any kind of harassment or bullying, threat
or extortion online – “fake news, fake profiles [impersonating
you], fake information about your life, confidential infor-
mation about you or your partner, any revenge porn, anydistracting or abusive photos or videos of you and your life,
and any kind of humiliation about you online”. Atak caveats
the final point by explaining that the policy won’t cover
legitimate free speech: “If I write something online that says
‘You’re stupid’, that’s humiliating of course, but everyone has
the right to think of you as stupid.”
As Atak prepares his insurance product – he plans to launch
in the UK in September 2019 – he has already become an
unlikely white knight for Danish teenagers who are victims
of cyberbullying, albeit only the ones who can afford to pay.
He tells me he gets teenagers and their families contacting
him every month to ask for help in taking down unwanted
content, be it bullying or revenge porn (which refers to the
non-consensual sharing of someone’s intimate photos). Of
these enquiries, he takes on around eight teenagers a year
who are able to pay his costs. One case he worked on involved
a 15-year-old girl whose naked images ended up on a “crazy”Taking down cyberbullies:insurance policies aim tostem the tide of online abuseWWilliam Atak helps companies hide unflattering
information online – now he’s courting
a new client: teenage victims of cyberbullying09-19-STCyberbullying.indd 28 24/06/2019 11:42