I see where you are coming from, but there are a couple of things I think you should consider. First, that "unreliable online material" is likely a social netw

I see where you are coming from, but there are a couple of things I think you should consider. First, that "unreliable online material" is likely a social networking site and can be tied to the person in question with a high degree of reliability. This is certainly not perfect, mistaken identity is always possible, as is impersonation, but on social networking sites you can normally say it is more likely than not the right person. I am not saying that it is right to make judgements on someone's employability based on those sites, just that you can often be pretty confident you are talking about the right person. Next, the rational for rejecting an applicant is very frequently "We found a better candidate." Now, the reason they judged that other candidate to be better might be because they found something they didn't like about applicant A on the internet, but that is still often going to be the rationale.