Whisper networks have always been a thing — people, primarily women, warning each other about weird or creepy men in their local area through word-of-mouth. Thanks to social media, these networks have turned into actual online communities, like the plethora of “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook groups in cities around the world.

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While some people, like TikToker Kahn, argue that if you’ve never treated women poorly, you have nothing to fear from these groups, others have argued that the groups fail to distinguish between shitty behavior like ghosting or cheating to outright criminal behavior like assault or fraud, and lumping men who’ve done the former in with men who’ve done the latter isn’t ideal.

These groups have become so influential now that one Chicago man, Nikko D’Ambrosio, is suing dozens of women and several tech companies, including Meta, for $75 million after his name and photo were posted in the “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook group for the Chicago/Naperville/Elgin areas.

The original post was made by a woman who hooked up with D’Ambrosio after meeting him at an event earlier that evening, after which they went on a series of “unremarkable” dates, per D’Ambrosio, but never entered into an exclusive relationship. In the lawsuit, D’Ambrosio alleges that the woman spread lies about him in the Facebook group, including that he got “very clingy” very quickly, flaunted his money and “kept talking about how I don’t want to see his bad side, especially when he was on business calls.”

Several other women commented sharing their own experiences with D’Ambrosio, or sharing that they’d seen other women warning people away from him before. The lawsuit names 27 women, including those who commented on the post and moderators of the Facebook group, as well as parts of Facebook’s parent company, Meta.

D’Ambrosio’s complaint states, “The defendants broadcast their outrageous, cruel and malicious lies about the plaintiff with knowledge that the statements were false or with reckless disregard as [to] whether or not they were true. [Their] wrongful conduct is so outrageous in character and so extreme in degree that it is beyond all possible bounds of decency and is to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in a civilized community.”

According to CBS News, D’Ambrosio’s team hopes that a new Illinois anti-doxxing law, which went into effect on January 1st, could help them win the case. Since filing the suit, his lawyers have received dozens of calls from other men who have seen their personal information shared in similar groups. Essentially then, the whisper network is about to go on trial. 

This is far from the first time online whisper networks have broken into the mainstream — West Elm Caleb comes to mind, as does the Shitty Media Men List — but it could potentially set a significant legal precedent about something women have been engaging in, in one form or another, for centuries. Meta will most likely argue that as a company, it doesn’t have the capacity to micromanage the millions of Facebook groups on the site (recent layoffs of moderation staff and decisions to rollback safety policies suggest this isn’t a priority for the company).

Of course, the case could also just be dismissed. Whatever the legal outcome, it wouldn’t be surprising if the suit saw women return to more informal forms of whisper networks — ones that don’t leave a paper trail and subsequently leave them open to legal ramifications.