The Internet hates Kurt Greenbaum… and is now wreaking revenge

Kurt Greenbaum

Kurt Greenbaum is now universally hated by the denizens of the Internet. An editor at the St. Louis Dispatch, he wrote an article entitled, “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever eaten? And did you like it?” Greenbaum volunteered “octopus” and “Rocky Mountain oysters” and asked readers to submit theirs.

Someone (hilariously) wrote “pussy.”

The Dispatchers didn’t like that, and erased it. (C’mon, Dispatchers, loosen up! It’s the Internet. People get crude in here. Get used to it.) The anonymous vulgarian had the nerve to enter the comment again! So Greenbaum erased it again, but he noticed that the IP address belonged to a local school.

So he sent it to the school. The school’s IT director figured out who the miscreant was, confronted the person, and that employee immediately resigned.

Then Greenbaum wrote a post bragging about this. Unwise. Very unwise. The Internet is very angry now. If you go to www.KurtGreenbaum.com, you get this screen:

It gets worse…

At the “Kurt Greenbaum is a Pussy” website, one finds many photos of Greenbaum as well as this message:

Welcome to www.KurtGreenbaumIsAPussy.com, where we chronicle how a St.Louis douchebag who didn’t understand how the Internet worked watched his career go down in flames.

There are five steps described there for how Greenbaum plotted the death of his online career:

Step 1: Get Hired As the “Director of Social Media” for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (Where you should theoretically start learning about how the Internet works, especially social media.)

Step 2: Be a Blogger and Neglect to Register Your Own Domain Name:

Step 3: Ask a Loaded Question on the Internet and Beg Every Juvenile to Deliver the Punch Line.

Step 4: Become a Pussy, Morality Vigilante and Tattle-Tale, Violate Your Own Privacy Policy, Cost a Guy His Job and Then Publicly Gloat About It.

Step 5: Get Your Ass Handed to You by the Internet Hate Machine.

Then it points to the stories piling up in Google, Google News and elsewhere condemning Greenbaum. And then it gives his contact information, as well as phone numbers and email addresses for his bosses, making it easy for Internet denizens to call for his head.

Lesson learned perhaps. But Greenbaum’s Google results are ruined forever. And he’s had to protect his tweets, which is not something a social media director should be doing.

As bloggers and Web site managers, we have a serious duty to our community. Its akin to the relationship between a reporter and a source. Unless a commenter chooses to provide identifying information, you should treat them as you would an anonymous source, and not think about outing them. (If a court-ordered subpoena comes your way, you might have to think about it.) This was a serious violation of the blogger-commenter relationship.

Greenbaum defends himself (weakly) on his personal blog. The address for which, he unwisely chose igreenbaum.com.