January 17th 2020

By Bill Berkowitz

2016 was the year fake news blew through U.S. political campaigns like a category five hurricane, with armies of paid commentators, bot-shops and troll farms having a field day manipulating social media platforms. “You can attack based on anything,” one supervisor told his troll farm employees in Ukraine. In 2020, to paraphrase the 1960s activist and author Julius Lester, “Look Out America! electoral manipulation’s gon’ Get Your Mama, Your Papa, Your Sisters, Your Brothers, Your Family, Friends and Neighbors!” Move over Lee Atwater, Terry Dolan and Frank Luntz. and welcome to the twenty-first century’s public relations’ Wild Wild West; a world being characterized by the rise of what some are calling “black PR.”

While public relations outfits have always had the tools of misinformation, disinformation and spin in their arsenals, a new breed of public relations operatives are pulling out all the stops to amplify their messages through enhanced twenty-first century online manipulation.

According to BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman, Jane Lytvynenko and William Kung, “There is now a worldwide industry of PR and marketing firms ready to deploy fake accounts, false narratives, and pseudo news websites for the right price.” With a click of a button, “thousands of fake social media accounts spread [articles] across the internet, instantly sending manipulated content into news feeds, messaging app inboxes, and search results.”

A mini-PR primer

In the early 1900s, Ivy Lee, a founder of modern public relations, defined public relations as: "a management function, which tabulates public attitudes, defines the policies, procedures and interests of an organization... followed by executing a program of action to earn public understanding and acceptance."

Although ambiguous by its very nature, in August 1978, the World Assembly of Public Relations Associations defined the field as "the art and social science of analyzing trends, predicting their consequences, counseling organizational leaders and implementing planned programs of action, which will serve both the organization and the public interest."

In 1982, the Public Relations Society of America, a professional trade association, defined it as: "Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other." In 2011 and 2012, the PRSA solicited crowd supplied definitions for the term and allowed the public to vote on one of three finalists. The winning definition stated that: "Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics."

“Disinformation for hire…”

"I developed this for manipulating public opinion,” Peng Kuam Chin, who runs a company called Bravo-Idea, told the Reporter, an investigative news site in Taipei, which partnered with BuzzFeed News for an article titled “Disinformation For Hire: How A New Breed Of PR Firms Is Selling Lies Online.”

Peng has “clients [that] are companies, brands, political parties, and candidates in Asia,” he told BuzzFeed/the Reporter. “‘Customers have money, and I don't care what they buy,’ he said. They’re purchasing an end-to-end online manipulation system, which can influence people on a massive scale — resulting in votes cast, products sold, and perceptions changed.”

In the past several months, both Twitter and Facebook announced the taking down of suspected accounts – 5,000 by Twitter and “hundreds of accounts, pages, and groups that it found were engaged in ‘foreign and government interference.’”

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told BuzzFeed News that “The broader notion of deception and influence operations has been around for some time, but over the past several years, we have seen [...] companies grow up that basically build their business model around deception.” 

The emergence of black PR firms means investigators at platforms, security firms, and within the intelligence community are “spending increasing amounts of time looking at the disinformation-for-hire services that are out there,” said Cindy Otis, a former CIA officer and the author of True or False: A CIA Analyst's Guide to Spotting Fake News.

PR firms around the world are not shy about the services they provide. “The Archimedes Group, an Israeli black PR firm, created networks of hundreds of Facebook pages, accounts, and groups around the world, boasting on its website that it would ‘use every tool and take every advantage available in order to change reality according to our client’s wishes’” BuzzFeed reported.  

“In Ukraine, the PR firm Pragmatico employed dozens of young, digitally savvy people to pump out positive comments on fake Facebook accounts about clients. (For more on Ukraine operations, read “Inside a Ukrainian Troll Farm”

as reported by Yevheniia Motorevska, Dmytro Replianchuk, Vasyl Bidun.)

In Poland, Cat@Net managed networks of fake Twitter accounts operated by staffers with disabilities working from home, whom the agency hired because it could pay them below-market rates while they received government subsidies.” 

BuzzFeed’s investigation “looked at account takedowns by platforms that deactivated and investigations by security and research firms [and] found that since 2011, at least 27 online information operations have been partially or wholly attributed to PR or marketing firms. Of those, 19 occurred in 2019 alone.”

According to BuzzFeed, the global public relations industry is aware of, and has in some cases, “battled [these] problems of its own making.” “While the legitimate PR industry works to differentiate itself from these practitioners, platforms are finding it increasingly difficult to prune black PR from their ecosystems,” BuzzFeed pointed out.

“If the company is working on multiple platforms and has a wide range of business interests, we might not be able to completely destroy them,” said Facebook’s Gleicher.

We’ll give Tapei’s Peng Kuam Chin the last word: “I think cracking Facebook is quite easy. My software is developed to constantly fight against Facebook. This is done because there are markets, customers, and needs, and people have money to pay for the service. We do it because there is a demand.”