Inside Tattle Life: Exclusive Interview With The Founder of The Gossip Forums

All the most common questions about the tattle life gossip forums as answered by the founder Helen McDougal.

Q: Why was tattle life setup?

Helen: Tattle life was set up because so many people were just brazenly breaking the guidelines for adverts. People are all too aware that the regulators are toothless and don’t have the time or money to really look into influencers.

In the past, the authorities were just regulating adverts in papers, tv and radio. But the number of adverts you get these days with everyone on social media must have made the number go up by at least 10 fold, if not 100 or even 1000 fold.

Funding for the authorities that deal with adverts has not gone up at all to cover this. Even the very amateur one-man-band social media talent agencies know they are unlikely to get pulled up on flouncing the laws so they advise their client to fragrantly break them.

Of course it is a gossip site, so we’re not going to take the moral high ground. Some messages are bitchy, but they aren’t hateful, abusive or threatening. Gossip has existed a long time before the invention of paper, let alone the internet.

Q: What’s the most common complaint you get about Tattle life?

Helen: This is easy! It’s “my post was deleted, this isn’t free speech..” or something along those lines.

Tattle was never about a free for all. That would just descend into a horrible mess. We have long-running threads and it isn’t about arguing with each other.

If you’re disillusioned by someone you can read their main thread, if you love them you can read their rave thread or post comments on their own feed. Rave threads tend to not be as popular because these comments aren’t deleted on someone’s feed.

Lots do join tattle with the clear intention to disrupt and shut down the conversation, then they act surprised that they’re banned.

Most influencers complain about tattle life and just talk about comments on their appearance, when this is a tiny percentage of all comments. Yes they may not be nice to read about yourself, but that’s what happens when you make yourself a public figure.

Q: Are there any rules on Tattle Life?

Helen: Yes, lots and lots! Check out the link on the tattle life footer.

For instance, we don’t allow threads on people that are having mental health issues or going through a difficult time like child bereavement. They may be posting online, but we’re not here to make anyone’s life difficult that is already struggling. It’s dealt on a case by case basis but our members have a strong ethical code and do report when a thread is getting out of hand.

I personally hate deleting comments, but it has to be done at times. There’s never any hidden agender by the admin or mods, we only ever want the threads to run well for everyone

Q: What do you think about the articles that came out about Tattle Life?

Helen: They make me feel a bit sad, to be honest. Journalism was at one point a professional and respected career. Now it’s Just about clickbait articles that get the traffic. I don’t blame the staff writers as I know they are under pressure to churn out articles at a rapid speed with next to no time to actually do any investigation.

You could tell from pretty much all the articles they already had their viewpoint and article written without even looking at tattle life. The I started off with “Hateful comments, vicious trolling and dangerous doxxing – the online forum Tattle Life is basically everything that’s bad about the internet all in one place.” when there’s absolutely no doxxing or comments bordering on hateful or vicious. We have a very strict set of rules that anyone can read that’s linked at the bottom of every single page on tattle life.

One article said something along the lines of “unsurprisingly the people with the most followers have the biggest threads” as if people are only talking about an influencer because they are jealous that they’re popular when that just isn’t true. The people with the biggest threads are the people that are the shadiest online. Most people that contribute to a thread are former followers that are now disillusioned by all the lies and hidden adverts.

Q: Is there any message you would like to give to social media influencers that don’t like tattle life?

Helen: I would suggest to not read it. It isn’t trolling as it gives people somewhere to comment about people that choose to become a public figure and broadcast their private life to make money.

You can’t expect to live your life online as a business and only receive praise.

If tattle ever did shut down, another site would pop up in seconds to fill the void and several others already exist. Tattle is a much stricter and as a result much nicer place than many of the others and both our members and influencers benefit from that.

For their own sakes it’s best influencers don’t lie about what is posted on tattle. Several influencers who blatantly lied about what was posted on tattle to suit their own agender and ended up driving a huge amount of people to the site. Many people looked beyond an Instagram story to quickly found out the influencer had lied and how dishonest they have been.

It’s sad to see that the influencers we discuss here who’ve found themselves in hot water now seem to have the ability to control the media by encouraging journalists to print their bullying narrative without said journalist conducting any background checks into the site itself.

They have large platforms and the ability to control the narratives on these platforms, now they seem to have a strong hold in what the press say about this site to, I’d urge anyone who reads an article to come here themselves and take a look with unbiased eyes, you’ll notice a lot of our new members are ones who have done just that.

Q: Have any threads or posts ever been deleted due to legal threats?

Helen: No.

We have a very strict set of rules that go above and beyond so it doesn’t even get into any grey areas legally. Everyone is encouraged to report a post (long term member or visitor) and it will be investigated. We may miss some comments if no one reports them, but out of thousands posted every day we do our best and are far more stringent than sites like Facebook, Reddit or Twitter.

We arent perfect but if there’s a comment that breaks our rules and it hasn’t be removed then almost certainly it hasn’t been reported and we aren’t aware of it.

Q: What do you think of the petition to shut down tattle life?

Helen: From what I hear it was set up by someone that inserted themselves into drama, was trolling people on live chats and banned from using tattle to try to get attention for their videos on YouTube.

It did have 6 signatures after a couple of weeks, but we allowed a thread on it to be posted with a link on tattle. There it gathered some speed as the countless influencers that have threads on tattle posted a link to it.

A calculation was done that it had been shared by people with a combined 10+ million followers and only around 20 thousand people had signed it. I think many did sign it believe the lies that influencers said without reading for themselves the truth. But they are influencers after all.

I’m not fan of change.org petitions, they are only ever any use to register discontent with a private company. But all they are out to do as a company is make money. I don’t like how they ask for donations and people may think it’s going to that cause, when all it’s used for is to give change.org money to advertise a petition across their own site.

What do you think is the future of tattle life?

Helen: I expect it to slowly die out and I look forward to that.

I hope regulations catch up and influencers become open to criticisms regarding their business practices, therefore there won’t be a need for a separate platform to express our frustrations and views, but until then tattle is not going anywhere. I think of it a public service.