Inside the Business of Online Reputation Spin

The Guardian has a long, thought-provoking piece (it's an excerpt from an upcoming book) on the way that online PR works, when individuals or organizations pay online spin doctors to change the way they're perceived online. Embarrassing photos, ill-considered social media posts, even quips that have ended up geting the speaker into hot water, can all be crowded out, even if not actually expunged, by injecting lots of innocuous information, photos, and other bits of information. That crowding out seems to be the reputation managers' prime tactic. Besides a brush of his own with identity theft (or at least unwanted borrowing), the author spoke at length with both Adria Richards and "Hank"; both of whom ended up losing their jobs in the aftermath of what became known as Donglegate, after Richards tweeted about jokes that she overheard Hank and another developer share at PyCon 2013.

Comments

Doesn't matter.

[fyngyrz]

Wikipedia carries a great deal of bad and misleading information, as well as attacks and cover-ups. The editing (by which I mean arbitrary, supervision-free, largely random and often outright wrong top-down meddling with content) is nothing short of terrible. What keeps Wikipedia going is the users. What keeps setting it back is the meddling from above. Nothing has ever managed to keep misinformation out of it -- in either direction. That said, Wikipedia has long since mutated from its optimum form -- actually open -- into a pseudo-intellectual grandstand for its operators, replete with locked pages carrying their opinions to the masses.