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Imagine for a moment that you run a big, successful business. After years of disproportionate success, the company is facing a crisis. Public opinion has begun to turn around – against your business in general and against you in particular – and your management team is now faced with the question of what to do.
Your communications manager is responsible for managing the audience response. Over time, it will appear that this response involves the hiring of a public relations agency whose work includes what is euphemistically called "opposition research" and which is more commonly understood as involving defamation. These campaigns target your critics with anti-Semitic tainted attacks and use the services of a partisan news site that promotes your talking points to more traditional outlets.
As CEO, your responsibilities are vast. But the crisis in question is undoubtedly the most serious that you have faced. So, what do you know about the communication plan to deal with the crisis – and when do you know?
If you are the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Director of Operations, Sheryl Sandberg, the answer to these questions is Wednesday. That's when New York Times released its investigation into the company's treatment of the 2016 Russian influence campaign, details of which continued to circulate in the company on Friday.
In the company's version of events, an unspecified member of the communications team hired Definers Public Affairs to monitor the press about the company, assist with product announcements, and conduct an occasional campaign of murmurs against foreground enemies. The company reports have been sent to hundreds of Facebook employees over the past year, but if they reach Zuckerberg or Sandberg, they do not seem to have registered with them.
The person who oversaw communications at the time – the person ultimately responsible for recruiting agencies – was Elliot Schrage, who held that position for a decade before resigning in June. His departure marked a rare upheaval in Facebook's M team, whose composition has remained virtually unchanged for many years. And yet, although Schrage officially left, he announced in a goodbye message that he was planning to stay to handle the transition to his successor, Nick Clegg, next January – and that he would continue to work on special projects afterwards.
And he has. I am told that Schrage has been seen on campus as recently as Tuesday. Does he work on the fallout from Definers? Facebook has not responded to my request for comment. But it is at least possible that the fall of Definers' history is still working on one of the things for which he has publicly taken the fall for.
Meanwhile, journalists are interested in how the Definers work. the Timeexamines how he attempted to get ahead of congressional hearings by publishing fact sheets listing the ad tracking tools used by Senators on their own websites, as well as the amount of their advertising spending on Facebook. CNN discovered that the firm was trying to create a story about liberal bias at Apple. (Facebook says the job was not done on his behalf.) They also launched The edge (probably unrelated to Facebook) a negative story about the Bird scooter company.
AT TechCrunchTaylor Hatmaker finds several other links with Definers on Facebook, where former Republican campaign employees who once worked with his co-founder are now working on the communications team.
Sandberg, who was silent for a day, posted a Facebook post on Thursday night, largely recalling the points others had already mentioned. This was the key passage for me:
We did not work with them anymore, but at the time they were trying to show that some of the activities against us that appeared to be grassroots also had important organizations behind them. I did not know we had hired them or the work they were doing, but I should have done it. I have great respect for George Soros – and the theories of anti-Semitic conspiracy against him are odious.
Sandberg then called for CBS this morning to discuss the story. "We absolutely did not pay anyone to create false information," said Sandberg – and although many people say more or less Facebook, it should be noted that the Time history does not have.
The Definitors released their first public statement, letting everyone know that the consequences of their name were being set aside, they are in fact just a neighborhood clipping service. The statement does not deal with his "internal false news store", as a former employee called him to NBC. NTK, which shares a co-founder and a physical office with Definers, issued a statement claiming that this was all a coincidence. (Farhad Manjoo has a good roast of this here.)
One of the Definitors, Tim Miller, has issued a much better statement, in which he travels most of Time story and explains his side. He pays minimal attention to defamation campaigns, and no attention to NTK, but addresses at least the implications of spreading documents linking Facebook's critics to George Soros, even when this link is legitimate.
Are we paying too much attention to just one PR firm? I do not think so. The field of public relations is a vast and largely invisible force that shapes most of the information you consume, whether you know it or not. It's a dark plot that's really true! In the United States, there are six public relations representatives for every journalist who works and, for the most part, they operate in an invisible manner. Much of the work is mostly benign, but overall, it exerts a force that keeps reporters away from more enterprising narratives than they could otherwise cover. And when the stakes are higher, companies are more likely to resort to agencies that resort to unfair tactics – and the public should also be aware of these tips.
I've spent the last few days discussing with people in and around the orbit of Facebook about the likelihood that Zuckerberg and Sandberg would not know that they had hired Definers. Former employees with whom I spoke unanimously agreed that they believed in Zuckerberg when he said the opposite. Communications, they said, were usually something that he was willing to delegate. I spoke with other CEOs, outside of the social realm, who told me that they almost never knew with which agencies their communications officers were working at any given time. I spoke to people who hired agencies and said that their CEOs had never asked them questions.
As many observers have pointed out, not knowing who your agencies are is giving you a plausible denial that can be helpful when they become nasty. But in the middle of a crisis, it seems that more attention is being paid to details. Admittedly, it was unlikely that Facebook's hiring of a public relations agency in crisis would turn into a crisis. But the unexpected has crossed every corner of Facebook for over two years now. The effort to reset the story in friendly terms for you – and the tactics with which you intend to do so – would seem to deserve the CEO's attention.
Democracy
Facebook reports massive increase in government data requests, including secret orders
Zack Whittaker reports that Facebook has released details of 13 national security letters, while the US government is asking for more and more user data.
Notifications every 2 minutes: this in-depth look at how people really use WhatsApp shows why it's so hard to fight fake news
Laura Hazard Owen has an excellent summary of something that I missed a bit because personally, you did not send me an email about it! The BBC conducted a week-long series on misinformation of TK. Owen has an amazing detail about the unexpected consequence of WhatsApp, which recently added a "forwarded" tag to forwarded messages, supposedly encouraging users to query the source of the information they receive:
For example, WhatsApp, under pressure from the government, added a "Transferred" tag to India to show that the messages could come from an unknown source. But "we found that most citizens did not really notice the label or if they noticed that they misinterpreted its meaning. In what may be an isolated case, one respondent even thought the tag was an encouragement to keep the message forward! "
Somewhere else
What Facebook knew and tried to hide
If you prefer to speak Facebook in audio format, The daily did an episode on the situation on Friday.
Facebook's morale, already hurt by sharing, suffers another blow
Sarah Frier is catching up with what Facebook employees are saying about the anonymous Talk-Trash-About-Your-Job Blind application:
"I'm exhausted from having to clean up after the careless and careless mistakes that have made so many so rich, so rich leaders," said a third.
Facebook loses two senior executives after the founders
Sarah Frier has the scoop on two mean departures from Instagram:
Instagram loses two of its highest-ranking employees: Bangaly Kaba, head of growth, and Ameet Ranadive, who ran the product of the wellness initiative aimed at fighting bullying on the Internet. ;application.
Hackers steal Instagram influence accounts
Taylor Lorenz has details about a new smart hack on Instagram in which malicious people are trying out users with the promise of easily gaining money by influencing marketing and then prompting them to log in to a portal allowing the hacker to steal his login credentials and account.
Once the influencer has logged in with the user name and Instagram password, Brooks has taken control of the account. In minutes, he was sending millions of members infiltration offers for a free iPhone.
Brooks has targeted several YouTubers, Instagram stars and even pages and has used stolen pages to promote scammy-looking apps and fake free product offers. In the past month alone, he has grabbed @Fact, with 7.2 million followers, @Chorus, with 10.1 million, and @SnoopSlimes, with 1.9 million. Once the accounts are seized, the hackers update the account biography to indicate "managed by SCL Media" and begin to contact the brands by direct message, asking them to negotiate content sponsored contracts with SCL, and not the holder previous account.
Bitcoin gift scams are flourishing on Twitter. They probably come from Russia.
Jane Lytvynenko and Ryan Mac report the embarrassing prevalence of Bitcoin scams on Twitter:
Although the platform outright banned all cryptocurrency ads in March, scammers – some of whom appear to be based in Russia – have become more sophisticated and are starting to hack audited accounts with a high number of followers to push their numbers. scams. In some cases, they even bought and managed Twitter advertising campaigns to promote them.
On Tuesday, hackers were able to post tweets promoted on Target's accounts (1.9 million followers) and Google's business applications division, G Suite (more than 823,000 subscribers). via the Twitter advertising network. BuzzFeed News has also been able to purchase crypto-currency fraudulent ads in the same language.
"No morality": advertisers react to Facebook's report
The latest moral compass of our country, the advertising industry, is dismayed by the latest revelations on Facebook, reports Sapna Maheshwari. (We'll see if that translates to fewer ads on Facebook, you know that.)
The revelations could be "the last straw," said Rishad Tobaccowala, director of growth for Publicis Groupe, one of the world's largest advertising agencies. "We now know that Facebook will do everything necessary to make money. They have absolutely no morals.
How the Wall Street Journal prepares its journalists to detect deepfakes
the Newspaper is training its staff to recognize digitally manipulated videos:
At The Wall Street Journal, we take this threat seriously and have established a large-scale internal product working group, led by the Ethics and Standards and Research and Development teams. This group, the WSJ Media Forensics Committee, includes editors of videos, photos, visuals, research and platforms as well as news writers trained in deepfake detection. Beyond this fundamental effort, we organize training seminars with journalists, develop guides for newsrooms and collaborate with academic institutions such as Cornell Tech to identify ways in which technology can be used to fight against this problem.
Bumble is open to the right
Finally, there will be a public social network run by a woman: Whitney Wolfe Herd, CEO of Bumble. More of that, please!
launches
Facebook Messenger Builds "Watch Videos Together" Feature
And just when the application was finally getting simpler! Soon, you will be able to watch a movie in a group discussion or something.
Take
It's time to start regulating Facebook
Nina Jankowicz, a Russian disinformation researcher, got it with Facebook's recent revelations:
While Facebook tries to convince us that it redeems its sins (and sometimes uses dubious methods to do so), the company systematically violates the principle of "do no harm". Facebook's actions have shown that she believed the harm was good – inevitable, though, as long as profits are up and society can afford defamation campaigns to hijack its mistakes.
Mark Zuckerberg's reaction to Facebook's overwhelming history of the New York Times has proven its meaning.
Will Oremus is right to say that one of the reasons why tech companies love agencies is:
Of course, the ability to stand out from the tactics of a research firm on the opposition and plausibly deny knowledge is largely the reason why companies and campaigns hire it in the first place. Returning the Definitors and absolving themselves of responsibility is the quintessential "typical D-C relationship," which Zuckerberg has claimed to want to avoid.
Antitrust alone will not spare us from the "curse of the curse"
Gene Kimmelman, President of Public Knowledge and former Senior Counsel of the FTC Antitrust Division; and Charlotte Slaiman, public policy attorney at Public Knowledge, say dismantling big tech companies is not a panacea for Tim Wu and others to think it will be:
Although Tim recognizes the need for additional policy solutions, his interest in antitrust exaggerates his power to eliminate the full range of damage caused by highly concentrated markets. We also need regulation. The excessive market concentration and corporate power we see today is the result not only of conservative jurisprudence and unscrupulous application of antitrust laws, but also of excessive deregulation. It will take much more than antitrust laws to remedy the situation.
And finally …
Will Stanich ever reopen? Why the best burger spot in America has been closed
Here is a beautiful story about a man who embarked on a quest to find the best burger in America, and who named him, and the flow of attention which resulted on social media pushed the company into an early grave. It's a nuanced and beautifully told story about how the Internet can serve as a lens of attention, for better or for worse. To savor on weekends:
Stanich explained that while these issues were in the background, it was difficult to read the social media cops that were attacking them and listen to the answering machine messages at the restaurant calling him a fucking big fuck and telling him to fuck himself for closing his own restaurant. He did not care, he insisted. He cared only about people like this woman who had introduced themselves, the regulars of northeastern Portland. "I have to take care of the people who have taken care of me," he said. "They do not turn you on."
Talk to me
Send me tips, comments, questions and links to your favorite NTK stories: [email protected].
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