Social media, Musk and Gates et al, are revealed to be vehicles of access to public opinion. Wily companies are using these portals to flood the readers with whatever information someone is paying them to push
Mr. Baldoni texted Ms. Abel, flagging a social media thread that accused another celebrity of bullying behavior and had generated 19 million views. “This is what we would need,” he wrote.
Ms. Nathan soon floated proposals to hire contractors to dominate social media through “full social account take downs,” by starting “threads of theories” and generally working to “change narrative.”
“All of this will be most importantly untraceable,” she wrote.
Within days, the group was working with Mr. Wallace, whose company, Street Relations, offers services ranging from public relations to more opaque crisis management. He is a somewhat enigmatic figure with very little digital trail. But court records show that his clients have included Paramount Pictures and the YouTube personality Adin Ross.
And in a since-deleted LinkedIn profile, Mr. Wallace described himself as “a hired gun” with a “proprietary formula for defining artists and trends.”
I am not one who follows anything in social media, but I am interested in how an industry of manipulators is emerging
A brand marketing consultant, Terakeet, produced a report in August for Ms. Lively that concluded she had likely been the object of a “targeted, multichannel online attack” similar to one against Ms. Heard, and that it was damaging her reputation.
The report did not identify who was behind the attack. But by analyzing “the entirety of Google’s search index” for Ms. Lively’s name, it found that 35 percent of the results also included a reference to Mr. Baldoni. This was highly unusual given the length of her career, the company said, and suggested that the media environment was being manipulated.
More than ever it is now important to be extremely selective about where we seek information online.
