Someone is posting lies about you online
It rarely comes at you head-on. A friend forwards a screenshot, or you search your own name for something unrelated and there it is — a post saying you did something you didn’t do. A review on your business page. A thread on a complaints site. A no-name account tagging your employer. Nothing on the account points to a real person, and the claims are specific enough that someone who doesn’t know you might believe them.
What makes it so maddening is that it’s false and you can’t stop it by simply saying so. Set that instinct aside for a minute. What follows isn’t a legal argument or a plan for winning an online fight — it’s the order of operations I walk clients through, starting with the part that quietly matters most.
Capture it now — screenshots don’t survive a deletion
Posts get edited. Accounts get deleted. The person doing this may take content down the moment they sense you have noticed, and then put it back up somewhere else next month. Anything you have not captured is effectively gone, and a description of what a post said is worth far less than the post itself.
Capture full-page screenshots that show the account name, the timestamp, and the URL in the address bar rather than cropped images of the text alone. Copy each URL into a plain document alongside the date you found it and where it appeared. If a post has a permalink, save that too, because platform search results shift but permalinks do not. Keep it all in one folder, and keep the originals untouched even if you later make a tidier summary. PEN America’s Online Harassment Field Manual has a thorough section on documenting abuse that is worth reading if this looks like it will go on for a while. Our guide on how to preserve evidence in the first 24 hours covers the same ground for other kinds of incidents.
Do not reply, at least not yet
Replying feels like the natural response, and it is almost always the one that costs you something. A public argument gives the post reach it did not have, moves it up in the platform’s ranking because engagement is engagement, and produces a back-and-forth that later reads as a dispute between two parties rather than one person making things up about another. It also tells the person that you are watching, which for some of them is the entire point.
There are exceptions. If the false claim is sitting on your business listing where customers will see it, a single short, factual, unemotional reply that corrects the record and offers to resolve anything real can be worth posting for the benefit of the people reading, not the person writing. Write it, wait an hour, then read it again before it goes up.
What platforms will actually remove
Most platforms will not remove content just because it is false, and that catches people off guard. Their moderation rules are built around harassment, threats, privacy violations, impersonation, and coordinated behavior, and defamation as such is usually treated as a matter for the courts rather than the trust-and-safety team.
That does not mean reporting is pointless. It means the report should be framed around the rule the content actually breaks. If your address, phone number, or workplace appears in the post, that is doxxing and most platforms remove it on sight. If the account is using your name or photo to look like you, that is impersonation. If the same person is running several accounts to pile on, that is coordinated harassment or ban evasion, and it is worth reporting the accounts together rather than one at a time so a reviewer sees the pattern. Review sites have their own narrower angle: many will remove a review if you can show the reviewer was never a customer, or that it came from a competitor or someone with a personal conflict.
Our posts on what to do if someone doxxed you and someone impersonating you on social media go into the specific reporting flows for those two categories, which are often the strongest lever available.
Dealing with search results
Often the real damage is not the post but the fact that it ranks when someone searches your name. Removing the source page removes it from search eventually, but if the page stays up, Google’s removal options are limited to specific categories such as personal contact information, non-consensual explicit imagery, and content on sites that charge for removal. A false accusation on its own generally does not qualify. If the source is a data broker or people-search listing feeding the problem, our guide on removing your information from people-search sites is the more direct route.
The slower but more reliable approach is to give search engines better material about you to rank: a professional profile you control, a personal site, an active presence somewhere reputable. It is not satisfying, and it takes months rather than days, but for a name search it tends to do more than any takedown request.
When you need to know who is behind it
Eventually almost everyone lands on the same question: who is actually doing this? Suspecting isn’t the same as being able to prove it — and nearly every real next step, a cease-and-desist, a restraining order, an HR complaint, a civil claim, needs a named person, not a handle.
Here’s something people get backwards: a long-running campaign is usually easier to unmask than a brand-new one, not harder. I once worked a case where a single person had been anonymously defaming a school district for more than ten years. Ten years of feeling untouchable — and it took minutes to put a real name to the account. The longer someone operates, the more trail they leave behind them, and the more chances they’ve had to slip just once. On this, time is on your side, not theirs.
Some of the groundwork you can do yourself: reverse-image the photos the account uses, check whether the handle turns up on other sites, note writing habits and the hours they tend to post, look at who they followed and talked to before they started on you. The rest lives in records only the platform holds — the registration email, the login IPs, the phone number tied to the account — and those come out through legal process, not by asking. Our guide on how to find someone’s identity behind an anonymous account explains where that line falls and what a subpoena can realistically reach.
Where a lawyer fits
We are investigators, not attorneys, and defamation law varies a great deal by state and country. Still, it is worth knowing what a lawyer can do that nothing else can. A defamation claim can support a subpoena to the platform to unmask an anonymous poster, and in many places a demand letter from counsel to a named person ends the behavior on its own, because the calculation changes once anonymity is gone. Consultations are often free, and going in with your documentation already organized makes that conversation much shorter and cheaper.
If the posts include threats of violence, if they reference your home or your children, or if the pattern feels like it is escalating, treat that as a safety matter rather than a reputation matter and report it to local police with your evidence folder in hand.
The part worth holding on to
False claims online feel enormous from the inside and are usually much smaller from the outside. Most people who see the post will scroll past it. The ones who matter, the people who know you and the ones who will actually make decisions about you, respond to a calm, documented account of what happened far better than to a public fight.
You do not have to solve this today. Save the evidence, report what breaks the rules, and get a name if you need one. That is the whole path, and it works in that order.
— Lisa, GCCI