by Ryan Holiday
*See Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion for a discussion of blogs’ premature and overblown coverage of the 2009–10 Iranian protests and the subsequent crackdown on activists and social media in Iran.
*I’m sure he appreciated the irony of this in 2013 when many blogs, including Gawker, wrote posts accusing him of sexual assault. Oh wait, Arrington denied the charges and threatened to sue. †From an SB Nation post about the NFL lockout: “There are 382 more updates to this story. Read most recent updates.”
*I imagine these repeated and exhausting rumors of Jobs’s death made it all the more painful for his family when they were eventually placed in the position, three years later, of announcing that he had actually passed away. No family should have to posted at 4:00 a.m. It was obviously a hoax. Even the site MacRumors.com, which writes about nothing but rumors, knew this post was bogus and didn’t write about it. Nonetheless, following its iterative instincts, Business Insider’s sister blog, Silicon Alley Insider, rushed to advance the story as a full-fledged post. Apple’s stock price plummeted. Twenty-five minutes later, the story in tatters—the fake tip deleted by iReport, the rumor denied by Apple—worry: Are people going to believe us? or Will he get less than his proper due because the public’s patience has been wasted through so many premature reports?
XVII
CYBERWARFARE
BATTLING IT OUT ONLINE
Companies should expect a full-scale, organized attack from critics. One that will simultaneously overrun blog comments, Facebook fan pages, and an onslaught of blogs, resulting in mainstream press appeal. Start by developing a social media crises plan and developing internal fire drills to anticipate what would happen.
—JEREMIAH OWYANG, ALTIMETER GROUP, WEB-STRATEGIST.COM
Never forget, the press is the enemy, the press is the enemy. . . . Write that on a blackboard one hundred times.
—RICHARD NIXON
IN BYGONE DAYS A COMPANY MIGHT HIRE A PR MAN to make sure people talked about their company. Today, even a company with little interest in self-promotion must hire one, simply to make sure people don’t say untrue things about their company. If it was once about spreading the word, now it’s as much about stopping the spread of inaccurate and damaging words.
When the entire system is designed to quickly repeat and sensationalize whatever random information it can find, it makes sense that companies would need someone on call 24/7 to put out fires before they start. That person is often someone like me.
One of my first big contracts was a ten-thousand-dollar gig to handle a group of trolls who had been vandalizing a client’s Wikipedia page and filling it with lies and rumors. These “facts” were then showing up in major newspapers and on blogs that were eager for any gossip they could find about the company. “How do we just make it stop?” the company pleaded. “We just want to be left alone.”*
It’s the same predicament Google found itself in when Facebook hired a high-profile PR agency to execute an anonymous whisper campaign against them through manufactured warnings about privacy. Bloggers of all stripes had been pitched, with the idea of building enough buzz for the grand finale: editorials in the Washington Post, Politico, USA Today, and the Huffington Post. Like my client, Google was stunned by the plot. Imagine a $200 billion company saying, “Make it stop. We just want to be left alone.” But they were effectively reduced to that. “We’re not going to comment further,” Google told reporters during the firestorm of controversy. “Our focus is delighting people with great products.”
Sure, go ahead and focus on that, Google, but it doesn’t matter. Once this arms race has begun, things can’t just go back to normal. It escalates: A company sees how easy it is to plant stories online and hires a firm to attack its competitor. Blindsided by the bad publicity, the rival hires a firm to protect itself—and then to strike back. Thus begins an endless loop of online manipulation that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that’s the easiest of the PR battles a company may have to face.
Consider what happened to the French yogurt giant Danone, which was approached by Fernando Motolese, a video producer in Brazil, with two hypothetical videos.
One, he said, was a fun spoof of their yogurt, which was designed to improve digestive health and, um, other bodily functions. The other, he said, was a disgusting version of the first video, with all the indelible scatological images implied by such a spoof. He might be more inclined to release the first version, he said, if Danone was willing to pay him a fee each time it was seen.
“It felt sort of like blackmail,” said Renato Fischer, the Danone representative who fielded the inquiry, to the MIT Technology Review.1 Well, that’s because it was blackmail. It was extortion via viral video.
Nor is a profit motive the only thing that might make someone utilize these tactics. The hacking of the DNC in 2016—potentially by Russian operatives—and the hacking of Sony Pictures—potentially by North Korea—were both attempts to intimidate and influence through this kind of media shakedown.
THE IMPLICIT SHAKEDOWN
Motolese’s hustle is one of many styles of a shakedown that happens across the web countless times a day. Its only distinguishing feature was its brazenness. It’s usually couched in slightly more opaque terms.
Take Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch post entitled “Why We Often Blindside Companies.” What begins as an apparent discussion of the site’s news policy I see as a veiled threat to the Silicon Valley tech scene. After a start-up founder had, for the “second time,” publicly announced news about her own life before Arrington’s site had a chance to write about it (TechCrunch told her they were writing a story about her, so she broke the news herself), Arrington decided to make an example out of her. First he told his readers that he had nasty personal information on the founder that he had been reluctant to publish. This was a not-so-subtle reminder that he had dirt on everyone and that his personal whim decided whether it got out or not. Then Arrington took his stand, saying the founder would no longer be “getting any calls from [him] in the future to give her a heads up that [TechCrunch is] breaking news about her start up.” As though the journalist’s job to speak to sources they are writing about were a courtesy. He concluded on a friendlier note: “Treat us with respect and you’ll get it back. That’s all we ask.”* He may have ended his post nicely, but his message sounds no less extortionary to me than Motolese’s.2
Afghan warlords have a name for this strategy: ghabban, which
I would ask the same question of him that I once posed to a blogger who kept getting a story about American Apparel wrong. “When you find a mistake,” he’d said, “e-mail me and point it out.” I had to ask: Hey, man, why is it my job to do your job?
A while back, a plane of a major airline experienced potentially catastrophic trouble in the air. Despite a flaming engine and poor odds, the pilot managed to land it safely, saving the lives of four-hundred-plus passengers. Yet, as events transpired, Twitter users went berserk and reported that the plane had tragically crashed. In reality, not only had the plane landed safely, but the pilot acted like a gentleman from another generation, offering the passengers his personal telephone number if they had more questions or wanted someone to talk to. He exuded humble and quiet heroism that should have been recognized.
Only nobody knew about it, because the story online was so different. The Harvard Business Review criticized the airline for not responding quickly enough with marketing spin and for not magically stopping the rampant online speculation. They wrote: “What a pity that social media users, in their well-known enthusiasm for being first to share breaking news to their followers, would unwittingly conspire to obscure the big story of a pilot’s life-saving landing” [emphasis mine].
Yes, a pity. A word a neighborhood thug might use in the hypothetical “It’d be a pity if something ever happened to this nice little shop of yours,” and then try to collect monthly protection. These are the economics of extortion. The threat is less overt than “pay us o
r else,” but it’s a demand nonetheless. You must provide more fuel to the story and get out in front of it (even when there are more important things going on, like, you know, not letting the jet crash), or your reputation will be ruined. To not do this is to risk a vivid misperception that is impossible to correct with the truth, or anything else.
A CULTURE OF FEAR
Most social media experts have accepted this paradigm and teach it to their clients without questioning it: Give blogs special treatment or they’ll attack you. At any time, a hole could be dug by blogs, Twitter, or YouTube that the company must pay to fill in. And depending on the intentions of the person who dug it, they may also ask to be paid to not dig any more.
The Russian tactic of kompromat—releasing controversial information about public figures—is real and only more dangerous in an era where blogs publish first and verify second (if at all). When the public has been primed to jump on and share salacious gossip on social media, even upstanding citizens are vulnerable. In fact, it’s the good people who are most vulnerable since it’s more interesting to gawk at sordid revelations when they are least expected than it is to, say, hear about the one millionth instance of corruption or dishonesty emanating from the Trump family. The essence of kompromat is that it doesn’t matter if the information is true or not, or whatever disturbing means it was acquired, it just matters that it can intimidate and embarrass. And the media enables this tactic—they thrive on it.
Being right is more important to the person being written about than to the person writing. So who do you think blinks first? Who has to spend thousands of dollars advertising online to counteract undeserved bad press? Who ultimately hires a spinmaster like me to start filling the discussions with good things just to drown out the bullshit? It’s certainly not the media who is beefing up their fact-checking department to make sure innocent people are hurt.
Today there are dozens of firms that offer reputation-management services to companies and individuals. Though they dress up their offerings with jargon about performance metrics and customer feedback, their real service is to handle the disturbing, nasty, and corrupt dealings I’ve talked about in this book, so you don’t have to. Navigating this terrain has become a critical part of brand management. The constant threat of being blindsided by a false controversy, or crucified unfairly for some misconstrued remark, hovers over everyone in the public sphere. Employees, good, bad, or disgruntled and desperate for money, know that they have the means to massively embarrass their employers with well-placed accusations of mistreatment or harassment. People know that going to a blog like Consumerist is the fastest way to get revenge for any perceived customer-service slight.
That there are a million eyes watching, each incentivized to demagogue their way to a traffic payday, dominates discussions in corporate boardrooms, design departments, and political strategy sessions. What effect does it have? Aside from making them rightly cynical, it forces them to act in two ways—deliberately provocative or conservatively fake. In a word: unreal.
Blogs criticize companies, politicians, and personalities for being artificial but mock them ruthlessly for engaging in media stunts and blame them for even the slightest mistake. Nuance is a weakness. As a result, politicians must stick even more closely to their prepared remarks. Companies bury their essence in even more convoluted marketing-speak. Public figures cannot answer a question with anything but “No comment.” Everyone limits their exposure to risk by being fake.*
It’s now common for indie bands to avoid or turn down as much online press as possible, with some even going as far as obscuring their likenesses or withholding their names. Why? They are petri-fied of the backlash that has sunk so many promising “blog-buzz” bands that came before them. With the hype comes the threat of hate, and I don’t think this is limited to music blogs.
Overstock.com was compelled to address this unpredictable and aggressive web culture in a 10-K filing with the SEC. It is a precautionary measure many companies will have to take in the future—to let investors know how blogs could impact their financials with little warning and little recourse. Designating it as one of three major risk factors to the company, Overstock.com wrote,
Use of social media may adversely impact our reputation. There has been a marked increase in use of social media platforms and similar devices, including weblogs (blogs), social media websites, and other forms of internet-based communications which allow individuals access to a broad audience of consumers and other interested persons. Consumers value readily available information concerning retailers, manufacturers, and their goods and services and often act on such information without further investigation, authentication and without regard to its accuracy. The availability of information on social media platforms and devices is virtually immediate as is its impact. Social media platforms and devices immediately publish the content their subscribers and participants post, often without filters or checks on accuracy of the content posted. The opportunity for [the] dissemination of information, including inaccurate information, is seemingly limitless and readily available. Information concerning the Company may be posted on such platforms and devices at any time. Information posted may be adverse to our interests, it may be inaccurate, and may harm our performance, prospects or business. The harm may be immediate, without affording us an opportunity for redress or correction. Such platforms also could be used for dissemination of trade secret information, compromise of valuable company assets all of which could harm our business, prospects, financial condition and [the] results of operations.
Alarmist? Maybe. But I have seen hundreds of millions of dollars of market cap evaporate on the news of some bogus blog post. When the blog Engadget posted a fake e-mail announcing a supposed delay in the release of a new iPhone and Apple operating system, it knocked more than $4 billion off Apple’s stock price.
Maybe you’re not sympathetic to big corporations. What about when Eater LA* published a report from an anonymous reader stating that a popular Los Angeles wine bar not only had egregious health code violations, but also was advertising gourmet items on its menu while really serving generic substitutes?
Besides not adhering to simple food saftey [sic] standards, such as soap, sanitizing, and throwing out chicken salad that’s 2 weeks old, 90% of all “ fresh” menu items are cooked days beforehand and sit in the fridge.
Like so many online reports, this one turned out to be wrong. Completely wrong. So Eater added an update that said the proprietors disputed the story. Yet the post—the disgusting hygiene allegations and the headline—remained the same. The post stayed up for people to read and comment on. Only after a second update—prompted by the threat of a lawsuit—did Eater begin to admit any wrongdoing. It said, in part:
We ran this tip without contacting the owners of the restaurant, who have since refuted the tip in its entirety. We apologize to the owners of the restaurant, and our readers, for not investigating our source’s claims before airing them on the site. The resulting post didn’t rise to our standards, and we shouldn’t have published it.
Imagine if the restaurant had been a larger, publicly traded company. Stocks move on news—any news—and rumors passed on by high-profile blogs are no exception. It does not matter if they are updated or corrected or part of a learning curve; blogs are read by real people who form opinions and make decisions as they read.
I was once invited to a lunch at Spago with the then-CEO of the Huffington Post, Eric Hippeau. Some of the site’s editors attended for a bit of a roundtable discussion about the media during lunch. It was 2010, and the internet and national media were in a frenzy over reports of accelerator malfunctions causing unintended accelerations in Toyota cars. While we were eating, Eric asked the group a question: How could Toyota have better responded to the wildly out of control PR crisis?
Given that this was a room full of internet folks, as soon as the answers started, the pontification became overwhelming: “I think transparency is critical.” “These com
panies need to be proactive.” “They needed to get out in front of this thing.” “The key is reaching out to bloggers.” Blah, blah, blah.
It was a conversation I’d heard a thousand times and seen online almost every day. Finally I interrupted. “None of you know what you’re talking about,” I said. “None of you have been in a PR crisis. You’ve never seen how quickly they get out of hand. None of you have come to terms with the fact that sites like yours, the Huffington Post, pass along rumors as fact and rehash posts from other blogs without checking them. It’s impossible to fight back against that. The internet is the problem here, not the solution.”
In subsequent months I would be vindicated more than I could have anticipated at the time. First, the Huffington Post was hit with a PR crisis and failed miserably at responding by the standards they laid out at lunch. When sued by a cadre of former and current writers for their unpaid contributions, the Huffington Post was anything but “transparent.” They clammed up, likely on the advice of their lawyers, and didn’t cover the lawsuit on their own site. It was not until a few days later that Arianna Huffington posted her first—and the only—statement about it on the Huffington Post. Hardly “being proactive” or “getting out in front of it.” What else could she have done? The lawsuit was probably a money grab, but the Huffington Post had to mostly stand there and take a public beating, watching powerlessly as other blogs gleefully dissected and discussed the lawsuit without a shred of empathy.
Second, and most important, Toyota was largely exonerated after a full investigation by NASA, no less. Many of the cases of computer issues supposedly causing unintended acceleration were disproved entirely, and most were found to be caused by driver error. Drivers had been hammering the accelerator instead of the brakes! And then blaming the car! In other words, the scandal that Toyota was so heavily criticized for not handling right had been baseless. Toyota hadn’t been reckless; the media had. It was sites like the Huffington Post, so quick to judge, that had disregarded their duties to their customers and to the truth. As journalist Ed Wallace wrote for Businessweek in an apology to Toyota, “[A]ll the reasons why the public doesn’t trust the media crystallized in the Toyota fiasco.”