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?
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)