My first dev job out of college was in 2012 at a small media agency. We had some bigger clients, but we also still managed some super basic websites for local doctors, lawyers, etc that were some of our first clients when we the company was just starting up.
One day the CEO comes in and says, "We need someone to work with another company to make some changes to one of the websites and this is urgent". Since I was new and it was just text changes I got assigned the task.
Basically, one of the plastic surgeons who's site we managed was being sued for malpractice, and it was high profile enough that it made some local news websites. This surgeon hired a "reputation management" company to do pretty much what was explained in this article.
My job was basically to get on a call with this company and make the changes they requested, which was basically taking lines from the articles and working them into the surgeons website. So if a news article's said "The Daytona Beach plastic surgeon is accused of malpractice" we would go through his website and change text from "Dr Bloblaw" to "The Daytona Beach plastic surgeon" where ever we could. Additionally, they requested that I hide "Dr Bloblaw malpractice" and similar terms in small white text all over every page and some other black hat SEO shit. I'm sure there was more to it, since I took 3 or 4 calls with them spread out over a month, but I can't remember more details.
I'm long gone from that company and I'm sure those techniques don't work anymore, but yeah, in one form or another this type of reputation management is probably as old as SEO.
(Names and locations are changed)
There have, of course, been no shortage of press stories about the tiny minority ethical side of this - allowing some crime victim to move beyond the story of their attack or similar.
The press don't - at least as far as I have seen - yet seem to connect any of the above with the relatively recent influence on elections, stories of fake news, or use by politicians themselves as reputation management (e.g. that Boris Johnson interview where he was randomly claiming out of nowhere, and thoroughly unbelievably, his hobby is making model busses out of cardboard boxes. Gets reported everywhere, the £350m promises on the side of the Brexit bus gets moved down a Google page or two).
There's a very good reason the person who came up with the term Public Relations did it to rebrand the techniques and methdology used for propaganda.[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations_campaigns_of_...
Yep. I first heard about “reputation” firms doing this in 2009.
Is anyone out there creative enough to step outside the box enough to even envision a system that can support our current economic environment, let alone see a way to get this ship on that course before it's sunk?
The only reason this heuristic works is because news companies have become so untrustworthy that when left to their own devices they are only capable of writing negative articles about people. They never take the initiative to report positive news when a person or organization merits it. Even when a person or organization deserves praise, the media finds a way to spin it into a "if it bleeds, it leads" story.
These fake sites simply cut out the middleman.
The Economist has been one of the rare exceptions, though it's not really a business magazine...and has a regular profile page that is indeed the same sort of puff piece.
At least that was my impression as a callow youth in my 20s trying to get a couple of startups off the ground.
Also the Forbes family empire was admitted to be not especially large as they themselves described it, though believed to be >$100M
The business section often has a profile (complete with profile picture) of some worthy that always seems to be pretty positive.
Our ability to inform the public online is fundamentally broken, and here are these guys making a killing by literally lying to the world.
Is it worse than before or was it always broken?
These days it's carpet bombing black propaganda via all means online. If you control printed and/or TV news too, all the better.
Google has been successfully gamed essentially for its entire history. The fact that so many technical people believe the propaganda like "SEO doesn't work anymore" just shows how disconnected and gullible they are. And if technical people are naively Googling away, how much hope does that leave for your average citizen?
This is just how it is going to be now. Every search and every set of YouTube recommendations will contain a thousand lies and one truth, and it's your fault if you can't identify the true one.
This has never been, and will never be true. Free speech has always had legal limitations. It’s illegal to defame someone, for example.
Who really wants to live in a world where it’s so much easier and effective to lie than to tell the truth? Where the burden of seeking the truth becomes finding a needle in a haystack, do you want to live in that world?
History has shown us when societies fail to recognize the truth, and it has only ever brought death and destruction.
If the freedom to spread lies far and wide without repercussions overpowers our society’s ability to function, we’re in for some deep trouble.
The U.S. Government at the very top is infested now with habitual grifters and liars. Young people look at them, and go - it works for them, they are all rich.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/10/christianne-allen-g...
"Rudy's new 20 year-old spokeswoman hasn't finished college, pretended to be related to George Allen, and has given herself many titles that are not accurate. “Nobody can figure out who the eff she is or how she got in there,” a friend of Giuliani told me."
She is twenty.
When was this not the case?
''FDR was a gifted and facile liar,''
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/13/books/manipulative-secret...
I would expect much of the same from a glance at any politician. Politics is a field that rewards deception.
The perverse incentives of democracy have been illustrated from Plato through to Hans Hermann Hoppe.
The new way is obvious, shameless, blatant, and unapologetic. "We run this bitch, what are YOU going to do about it". No?
I grew up in Ukraine in the most corrupt post-Soviet era. Even then corruption was done with finesse. A lush mansion is hidden from the view, and you really need to go looking for it.
Not the Steve Mnuchin level of "we are going to take a private jet to Fort Knox, watch the Solar eclipse on top of a pile of gold, and put it on Instagram" kind.
From my view it is more of a wink into the camera. A whiff of self-irony and an acknowledgement of the farce. Shamelessly reveling in the spectacle while calling out the closeted prudes as hypocrites. Parodying stilted, cliched performances.
All of us are more aware of what comes up when someone googles us, that we will be judged based on what's out there.
Or perhaps it's just the money. One does not have to be a good citizen if you are loaded. Social contracts and norms are for losers. And, since Trump assembled the richest cabinet in U.S. history, it only makes sense.
I don't think anyone wants that, but this has been the case since the invention of the printing press and probably longer. It also gets really tricky when what is a lie vs. what is truth is not obvious.
The group of people that is pushing the "fake news" line definitely wants that. It is absolutely dependent upon lying to maintain power.
Someone is presumably making a handsome living by lying for the rich, so at least one person wants this. And there are people paying for this service, so clearly there are people who want to live in this kind of world.
It doesn't matter that this problem has existed forever. So has murder. Are you arguing that we shouldn't care about people murdering each other because it's a timeless problem? I assume no.
It's not tricky at all when someone knowingly, intentionally pushes fake content at scale to sway public opinion. That's an unconscionable act with very clear and dark intentions. That shouldn't be "tricky" to assess, because we know very clearly that what they are doing is absolutely, unequivocally, wrong.
Much of Europe still have criminal defamation laws on the books, for example.
In most of the USA, this simply isn’t accurate.
People who are smart in some ways can get fished-in by scams & frauds if they don't have the street-smarts to 'smell a rat'.
'How it is going to be' is the way it has always been. Lots of stuff happened in US history that most people alive at the time were unaware of. Those in power counted on it.
We now have the means to look into statements -much- more deeply -and- quickly than anyone 30 years ago could have done ... if we know where to look. We have the tools, if we choose to use them. If not, then we'll live like the people of the past did ... pushed and shoved around by politics, religion, rumor, time.
[1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2019/11/26/republic...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/19/locality-lab...
Both are scummy, but there's no clear law against this IF you're not a foreign agent. Surely it's believable that the government might want to forbid foreign operatives from doing things Americans are allowed to do. A trivial example is voting.
The core accusation with 2016 isn't "fake news", it's that a foreign intelligence service deliberately targetted a senior campaign staffer, stole his email, and selectively leaked it at the direction of the opposing US campaign.
The fake news stuff was bad too, but that's not generally considered criminal. The remedy to that was universally considered to be better gatekeeping on the part of the content intermediates (Facebook in that case, Google here).
When it's done by a foreign government, it's an act of aggression. When it's done internally, it's an expression of camping financing.
Like brain cancer vs skin cancer I suppose.
Is this an equivocation?
One are tiny, marginally impactful capitalist firms run by private individuals. The other are enormous nation-states that can wield the power of government -- and literal control over life or death -- to influence. Acting surprised as if this = that is specious and not useful.
We only investigated it this time due to cold war sentiments and weaponizing an obviously compromised candidate for the highest position in the land
Any other combination of this is not newsworthy, such as a PR company that happens to be in Portugal, or Rhode Island
That's why all the squawking about "The Russians! The Russians!" is so hilarious.
The kind of work Cambridge Analytica and these boiler rooms in Russian are doing isn't very sophisticated, and certainly doesn't require the backing of a foreign State. A couple of savvy tech people can (and do) inflict the same pain for reasonable sums of money.
So no, states are getting into this game.
You can dislike Trump all you want, but invoking the Russian boogeyman and smearing honest people like Assange is pretty low. The fact that political parties and major media outlets feel obliged to hide behind such transparently flimsy excuses is commentary on both how far the moral standard has fallen and the empty desperation of our cultural power brokers.
But I don't see how that's relevant here. Seth Rich provided the emails to Wikileaks and Assange is nobody's puppet, and Wikileaks definitely does not deserve to be called a "fake media cutout". Trump won the election because he appealed to a large number of Americans who voted for him because they thought he was the better candidate. Everything else is denial and excuse-making. Who said anything about a conspiracy requiring the coordination of "hundreds of career public servants"?
> You don't seem like a stupid person
Don't give him that. He believes things with no evidence for personal reasons, that's what stupid people do.
If you believe that Assange is a Russian agent, then sure, maybe it's not slam dunk, and it's just a very convenient situation for him that this unfortunate DNC staffer was gunned down under suspicious circumstances and now he can tell everyone that was the source and Rich isn't alive to deny it.
But it's not "no evidence" nor is it "personal reasons". If anything, the instantaneous flip against Wikileaks and Assange after they published documents implicating the establishment's favored candidate has a much more arbitrary feel.
He had a TV show on the Russian state propaganda network where he tore into Hillary Clinton all day. How much more gift-wrapped would you like his intentions to be?
> this unfortunate DNC staffer was gunned down under suspicious circumstances
Not only bullshit, but harmful, debunked bullshit. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-seth-richs-pare...
> I'd say the publisher explicitly naming the deceased in the context of a potential source counts as some evidence, at least.
See, no it doesn't. It proves absolutely nothing. They can claim whatever they want as a way of distracting from their partnership with the GRU. And they know people like you will accept it as long as it fits their narrative. No evidence needed, hardly any effort either. Just mention his name on Fox News and run with it.
I don't care if you can code, only people lacking in critical thought capacity (being diplomatic) believe conspiracy theories with no proof other than it fits their worldview.
Debunked in the opinion section? He was gunned down under suspicious circumstances. It's not less suspicious if you believe a gangster did it rather than a hired assassin, and regardless, giving Assange documents doesn't cast a magical force field protecting one from street robberies.
Did Russians hack the DNC? Probably -- Russian botnets attempt to brute-force basically every internet-exposed endpoint around the clock, just check your logs. It's neither here nor there.
>He had a TV show on the Russian state propaganda network where he tore into Hillary Clinton all day. How much more gift-wrapped would you like his intentions to be?
>I don't care if you can code, only people lacking in critical thought capacity (being diplomatic) believe conspiracy theories with no proof other than it fits their worldview.
Right, because "Assange is a Russian operative" is apparently not a conspiracy theory, because allowing RT to broadcast your TV series is apparently all the proof we need. Larry King, Jesse Ventura, and the late Ed Schultz are therefore also Putin lackeys, because there's no other explanation for cooperating with a television network that claims penetration into 700M households worldwide, just like there's no reason to ever have any business dealings or attend any meetings in a country that hosts two of the world's largest cities (Moscow home to 12M and St. Petersburg home to 6M). True Americans work only with local network affiliates and never venture outside of their small towns.
Like you.
This is why you don't engage conspiracy theorists even causally. If you don't insist that all opinions are evidence-based, literally anything can be true and anything can be false. The car that backfired outside my flat is a gunshot from a deep-state operative and here we go i'm blogging.
> Did Russians hack the DNC? Probably
Perfect example. "Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. We can never know." Yes we can. Unless we want to believe something else, then all it takes is a conspiracy theory about a murdered DNC staffer with no evidence and we have confirmation of what we believed all along. "Who is to say i'm wrong?" Right?
This is a never-ending rabbit-hole of shit that you apparently love to be in, I don't.
America is far from perfect, there is much to criticize of it, but they aren't waging an all-out war on objective reality to keep populations confused and infighting so a corrupt few and keep power. That's Russia. That's increasingly China. And you are gladly helping in their efforts, whether you realize it or not.
They gave a mountain of evidence why his death has been turned into a political conspiracy theory. There is next to no evidence in favor of your theory. The idea that Assange's comments are in favor of it is incredibly weak - he was receiving additional information after Seth Rich was already dead.
But that's how I read that article -- a plea to stop harassing them, and their official on-the-record statement which, yes, indicates they don't believe he would've been a source, so that people will reference that instead of continuing to harass them.
As for "a mountain of evidence", the only substantive statement as to whether or not Rich actually provided the mails is that investigators apparently told them that they didn't find any evidence of communication with Wikileaks or Assange on any of his computers, but of course, if someone is providing documents to Wikileaks, the fact that they didn't leave evidence of that sitting around on their known workstations isn't really a shocker (nor would it be a shocker if there was evidence on his known workstations and DC police just don't know how to do computer forensics).
I don't think his parents are really equipped to understand whether or not he would've had access to emails -- as most of us here know, most moderately-capable technical people can access virtually anything in a company's network. Remember that Podesta's Twitter was "hacked" during this whole affair because his password was trivially easy to guess; it's not like we're dealing with the NSA here (though note, Snowden was still able to exfiltrate the toppest-secret of the top-secret documents from there).
I'm not really sure what you're looking for, but I guess I can backtrack if it'll make you feel better: it's entirely possible that Seth Rich wasn't the source of the emails and it's probably not prudent to say "Seth Rich provided the emails". I take back the definitive tone and will refrain from such certitude it in the future. The emails definitely could've come from somewhere else, possibly even actual Russian intelligence; ultimately, the source doesn't matter because nobody questions the authenticity of the documents.
That said, it's entirely possible that Rich was a source and that Assange wasn't just heartlessly exploiting a convenient homicide. Personally, I put a lot more trust in Wikileaks and Assange particularly, whose hacker ethos is well-known and lifelong, has a long track record of verified and reliable journalism, and publicly suffered for the courage of his convictions by living in exile than I put in career politicians and media barons who are trying to distract from their ultra-embarrassing performances throughout the 2016 election cycle.
The establishment was so certain that Trump would be crushed that they issued "Madam President" commemorative editions days ahead of the election. We can't pretend like they're not going to try to excuse that with something, no matter how ridiculous they have to get.
No coverup or wide-ranging conspiracy is necessary -- just a handful of powerful people implicitly colluding to conjure a scapegoat out of widespread xenophobia and ignorance, which, I think we'd all agree, is nothing new when it comes to the worlds of politics and mass media.
> Personally, I put a lot more trust in Wikileaks and Assange
Yes, that's exactly what I said. You are openly admitting to believing things either with no evidence, or significant evidence suggesting it's not true.
You let your emotions guide your critical thinking. You believe these things because you want to, not because they make the more objective, logical sense. You "trust" people more, or something "sounds" right to you.
And people here are claiming you aren't stupid for doing so, I disagree. I know guys making 500k that will talk your ear off about 9/11 and Seth Rich if you let them. They are idiots for doing so.
You either make decisions on fact-based reality, or you don't.
At the moment, there is no hard, undeniable proof either way -- there is the statement of some that they believe it's probably all driven by Russia and that Assange and Trump are Russian agents, and there's the statements from others that are more skeptical that it's necessarily all centered around Russia. There is going to be interpretation here. I'm willing to discuss the points where my interpretations come into play, and you're clearly not.
The "proof" that you're insisting must be taken as inscrutable truth that Assange is a Russian agent and that the election's integrity was compromised is a) the cable TV network Russia Today broadcast a show that featured Assange; and b) an op-ed from Seth Rich's parents that states they'd really like it if you didn't imply that Rich was Assange's source, because they really don't think he would've been Assange's source.
There's a reason I replied to not-you -- you're making yourself look silly here.
Evidence was presented behind closed doors, of which even the hardcore Trump loyalists didn't argue against. This is your proof, but again you aren't asking in good faith. No amount of "hard, undeniable fact-based reality" would ever convince people that already made up their mind.
In summary, you are asking for something you know not to be possible (complete disclosure), to confirm something you already decided wasn't true.
Snowden did that too. "If you have the evidence show it" know ing damn well they can't do that. And idiots lap it up.
Your "We can't know either way" both sides arguments are actually worse than lying. It promotes the idea that no representative government is possible because no truth is possible. The Kremlin loves this idea, because that rational is how they stay in power. And you are promoting this uncertainty, it's unclear if you realize your useful idiot status or not. I promise you the enemies of democracy don't care.
So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing during the 2016 election. Setting up fake new websites to generate content for clients to drown out real stores characterizing their misdeeds. All for just a few thousand per month.
This is unbelievable, and yet completely believable at the same time.