
Reputation management firms bury Google results by placing flattering content - eplanit
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-1-scrubs-its-image-online-11576233000
======
save_ferris
> Afterward, articles about him began to appear on websites that are designed
> to look like independent news outlets but are not. Most contained flattering
> information about Mr. Gottlieb, praising his investment acumen and
> philanthropy, and came up high in recent Google searches. Google featured
> some of the articles on Google News.

So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a
foreign government of doing during the 2016 election. Setting up fake new
websites to generate content for clients to drown out real stores
characterizing their misdeeds. All for just a few thousand per month.

This is unbelievable, and yet completely believable at the same time.

~~~
colechristensen
"Independent" news orgs do the same thing. Watch out for the next positive
article about a person or organization and ask yourself if it was written by a
journalist organisation seeking the truth or as a puff piece in collaboration
with the subject. There is a pretty blurry line between news and advertising
these days to a much greater extent than most realize.

~~~
altec3
Southpark has a pretty good episode on this -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z696bTiP8Ro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z696bTiP8Ro)

~~~
globuous
This is so amazing. I love south park, thanks for sharing ;)

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b0rsuk
I also got a broader message from this: there is a whole industry of services
aimed at only the wealthiest 1%, and you don't hear about it. We're starting
to live in a new class society, and for now the new nobility wants to stay out
of view.

~~~
whitepoplar
I'd be curious to see a list of them!

~~~
AWildC182
To add at least some substance, a big one is how you go about buying extreme
luxury goods. If you want a private jet, million dollar car, yacht, down to
bespoke ultra high end watches, suits, etc. you schedule an appointment and
get vetted before you even walk in the door. It's not a showroom affair where
you just walk in and buy something.

~~~
trillic
I'm young and don't make a huge amount of money but I'm a racing crew for a
few yachts competitively so I'm exposed to and worked directly with some
people with net worth's anywhere from a few million to a few hundred million.

The reality is that happens with dollar amounts even less than what you'd
think. If you want to go buy a used $100,000 fishing boat. Nothing crazy,
definitely not a yacht, the salesperson is likely going to run a background
and credit check on you before scheduling a test drive or tour.

It saves everybody time and prevents those who are unable to even afford the
fuel on the thing from wasting the salesperson's time or clogging up a
showroom.

Even the realtor I used to find my $1XXX/month apartment had me consent to run
a soft credit check before she would schedule tours with any of the higher-end
buildings within my price range.

------
shaneprrlt
> Mr. Gottlieb said in an interview with the Journal that he found his press
> coverage unfair and wanted to fight back.

Favorable opinions and professional character praises are not the same as fake
news as in conspiracy theories and outright lies. Really, this is just
criticizing people for acting in their own rational self-interest to protect
their reputation.

Idk, I guess you could make the valid criticism that this is bad practice
because this is a privilege only the wealthy and influential have, but I'd
argue that is (in most instances) the only class of people who likely have to
deal with a barrage of negative news coverage to begin with.

Which begs the question: do wealthy and influential people have the capacity
to reform their behavior, and are we willing to let people make mistakes and
try again in life? If the answer is yes, then clearly they need some recourse
against the astronomical influence of online search results and social media.

Wish the masses were just as open to forgiving people as they are for grabbing
the pitchforks and torches.

~~~
save_ferris
Status Labs posted content on this site to improve the profile of their
client:

[http://medicaldailytimes.com/](http://medicaldailytimes.com/)

That site is in no way legitimate in its construction or messaging. It makes
no mention that it's run by Status Labs, or NOT run by a legitimate medical
reporting outlet. Why obfuscate the true governance of such an online
property? Why are there zero contributors listed in the masthead or
contributors page?

How on earth do you look at this website and think "yeah, they're just trying
to help the defenseless welathy"?

~~~
shaneprrlt
> How on earth do you look at this website and think "yeah, they're just
> trying to help the defenseless wealthy"?

That's a bit of a straw man. 1) I don't think that, 2) I never said they were
defenseless. Clearly they are capable of defending themselves.

My entire point is that people, all people, outside of obvious outliers like
people who commit extreme violence, are capable of changing their behavior for
the better and should have the opportunity for a second chance, and since
socially there really isn't one, I understand why they take these measures.

~~~
rahidz
Except this further increases our class divide. The rich can bury any and all
negative coverage by spending loads of money creating fake websites and fake
news. If you get arrested (not even found guilty, just arrested!) and your
mugshot is plastered all over the Internet whenever someone searches your
name, can you afford to do the same? Can all people?

~~~
thaumasiotes
> The rich can bury any and all negative coverage by spending loads of money
> creating fake websites and fake news.

Ah, that's why nobody has negative views of anyone rich.

~~~
forgetfulusr
I have been hearing lots of positive reviews, even from comment boards
themselves. It seems like there are some firms that are too good at it. I
think the more positive things I end up hearing about someone rich, the worse
feeling I get of them, as if they overspent.. the dirtier you are, the more
scrubbing you do.

------
allovernow
I'm not surprised. With the cancer that is SEO, removal of advanced search
features, and mandatory and aggressive fuzzy matching, Google search has been
increasingly broken for years. It is technical-user hostile and arguably even
average user hostile at this point.

Today I switched back to ddg after not using it for months, hopefully it's
more mature now. This way at least I'm less likely to be tracked. I was
tolerant of the privacy issues when the search results were good, because the
power behind Google really is phenomenal, they had at one point achieved a
truly marvelous technical feat. But now scrolling through two pages of ads on
mobile only to find crappy matches from conceptually different synonyms is
simply intolerable. I imagine they're using some sort of transformer/encoder
and clearly the difficult problem of disambiguation is still not quite solved.
We're going to come up on a similar problem soon at the startup I work for,
but our domain is limited so it should be easier to constrain, but I
digress...

It's a shame to watch Google search gradually ruined by revenue driven
features.

------
Animats
Is there a site which finds the whitewashing articles and collects them?

I used to work the conflict of interest noticeboard on Wikipedia. There are at
least four rich ex-convicts with paid staff trying to whitewash their articles
on Wikipedia.

~~~
njharman
Google search

------
timcederman
Boris Johnson's self-serve efforts are pretty interesting:
[https://twitter.com/genmon/status/1169719026060320768](https://twitter.com/genmon/status/1169719026060320768)

------
jotato
I worked at a startup in 2007 that did this. I didn't work on this product,
but as far as I know, no "fake news" was ever posted. True stories and PR
stuff was put out. The goal was to generate more "noise" then a bad article
would and they would just disapear. Basically, standard SEO stuff everyone
does.

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supernova87a
Not too different from a rich person hiring people to say flattering things in
the press or basically paying journalists or subsidizing their access to
favorable events to get positive coverage. Well, maybe amplified a bit more by
the internet.

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cal5k
Well, here's the broader question: why can't you, as an individual, opt out of
showing up in Google search results altogether?

~~~
OJFord
Why should you be able to?

A court may grant an injunction preventing publication of certain facts or
identifying you in proceedings, but that's specific, why should it be possible
to opt out of ever appearing?

And where would it end, because there's no reason for that not to be
everyone's default position, but then if you run some business such that you
need the exposure, you're going to want 'business-only' results.

Or do you mean that news would be allowed, it just wouldn't appear in search
results? How would I find an article I recalled and wanted to revisit?

------
tyingq
Another trick is using secondary meaning for words in your reputation
management posts. So, if you were arrested, you post something like "John Doe
Reviews TV Show Arrested Development"

Then, backlinks, and it ranks well for "John Doe Arrest".

------
mnm1
I worked at a company that did this about ten years ago. This was the only
thing in the entire playbook. They also wanted to create an alternative to the
current FICO score based on their data, presumably a score that could easily
be influenced and increased by paying more money. Nowadays, the business is
very pedestrian. Half the Internet is posting lies and bullshit online these
days. These guys have just been doing it longer and for more money than most.

~~~
jotato
10 years ago? Seattle? VT?

Would be a small world, if so

~~~
mnm1
It was in the bay area.

~~~
winrid
Reputation defender?

------
dredmorbius
In addition to the many pre-Web / pre-Internet variants of this, there is the
established Web history of firms such as Reputation.com (previously:
ReptuationDefender):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation.com](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation.com)

------
firefoxd
Same thing for Magic Leap. The billions of dollars in investment may not have
given them the device they wanted, but it gave them the ability to bury all
negative news.

For the longest time, it was impossible to find criticism that I had already
read about the company. Try to look for the golem on google.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/gfZ9s](http://archive.is/gfZ9s)

------
theblackcat2004
Here in Taiwan we have agency that helps customer to bury your negative
articles or reviews for as little as 1.6k USD. If you have more budget you can
ask the media to remove your negative news coverage.

------
milesward
Heh, this article is 15 years late...

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gdsdfe
Wait, how is this bad?

------
_sbrk
Sounds a lot like The Orville episode "Majority Rule".

------
ryanmercer
I'm not saying that these companies should exist for the example in the
article, a high profile business person that failed miserably and tried to do
the same thing a second time, yes it is just downright wrong he has a bunch of
apparently fake PR about him claiming he's great and a genius and give him
your money.

 _However_ , there are valid use cases for such a service. There are things
you and I might say or do in haste that quickly get forgotten and are never
even seen by most of the population but...

The "1%" are in the spotlight, they can't go an ice cream cone without
articles about their ice cream appearing online [1].

What if a high profile individual is falsely accused of rape, or of fathering
a child, and it turns out it was a false accusation. Those dozens or hundreds
of articles/tweets/videos aren't going to go away. It will quietly be
announced by a handful of places "so and so was cleared, person was lying" and
for months or decades those accusation articles are going to stay high on
search results.

If John Smith gets a DUI, unless he did a bunch of property damage or killed
someone in the process, an article isn't going to be written. If a billionaire
does it [2] articles get written.

If a billionaire calls someone a pedo in a heated exchange, articles are
written about it [3]. If Jane Doe calls someone a pedo (or worse) on twitter,
one of her 13 followers might favorite the tweet, if another human being even
reads it.

I imagine a significant percentage of people using these services aren't
trying to defraud people, but simply trying to hide something embarrassing
that has been preserved digitally, widely, that John and Joan Public simply
never have to worry about. (nipple slip, porn tape, telling someone to eff off
when they're having a bad day, tweeting something in haste like calling
someone a creepy pedo, etc).

What if someone was formerly a neo-nazi, and they've spent the past decade
fighting against hate (several of these types exist [4]) and living a
completely different life? Should they not be allowed to bury their past and
be judged on their current works instead of the foolish things they did in
their youth?

[1] [https://time.com/2982204/paul-mccartney-warren-buffett-
selfi...](https://time.com/2982204/paul-mccartney-warren-buffett-selfie/)

[2] [https://money.com/a-billionaire-22-year-old-was-
fined-30000-...](https://money.com/a-billionaire-22-year-old-was-
fined-30000-for-drunk-driving/)

[3] [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-
canada-50695593](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50695593)

[4] [https://www.npr.org/2018/01/18/578745514/a-former-neo-
nazi-e...](https://www.npr.org/2018/01/18/578745514/a-former-neo-nazi-
explains-why-hate-drew-him-in-and-how-he-got-out)

~~~
tstrimple
There is an article in the local newspaper about my brother being arrested for
driving while intoxicated and being in possession of a controlled substance.
He's certainly not a billionaire.

~~~
ryanmercer
In a local newspaper, not on a dozen tech/finance major publications with
dozens of video clips talking about it from national and international
broadcast outlets.

Reporting crimes in newspapers at varying levels has existed effectively as
long as newspapers as they were a convenient means of notifying the public of
happenings. That's why you still have to publish certain things in newspapers
in many states, like when you want to change your name (for something other
than marriage/divorce) so companies/persons you might be trying to hide from
(for non-life or death situations like a battered spouse) have a reasonable
chance of detecting an attempted evasion.

What about when your brother buys ice cream? I bet he doesn't make
international news within hours, that then gets talked about for months by
radio/tv/online news/blogs/reddit/twitter/etc.

I bet when he flies somewhere he doesn't have paparazzi waiting for him at the
airport to take his photo, or people waiting to shove merchandise at him to
sign (this happens to a lot of famous people, people find out they're coming
in on a flight via various means and are waiting at the airport to try and get
merch/photos signed that they then go attempt to sell).

There is a world of difference between public notice of a DUI and
international press coverage before charges are even filed.

I'm not justifying the example case listed in the article, but put yourself in
the shoes of someone that has used one of these services. Are you telling me,
that if your brother could write a check and make any public record of his DUI
outside of a law enforcement system vanish, that he wouldn't? (also, you gave
a bad example as DUIs can be expunged in many states under various conditions
and a random newspaper article about him, if even found, would be dismissed by
any employer/lender/investigator when they ran his record and found it if he
had it expunged and if he didn't have it expunged they'd find it anyway).

If an ex-girlfriend accused him of something, I bet it never left facebook. It
would likely stay in the post and get ignored by a few people, a few people
would take her side and believe her, and that would be that. It would be lost
to time next to impossible to find in a feed. But what if a major business
person is accused (falsely, which is later verified as false). Guess what,
there are gonna be tons of articles that stay high in search results, there
might _never_ even be an article "the accuser admitted they lied, they wanted
attention and money, they have a history of accusing people".

------
malandrew
I'm actually okay with this development given that the media has devolved into
an industry that manufactures villains for the sake of eyeballs and ad clicks.

------
lonelappde
Nothing "1%" about this, it's basic business PR.

------
_emacsomancer_
E.g. Bill Gates: [https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-45-the-not-so-
be...](https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-45-the-not-so-benevolent-
billionaire-bill-gates-and-western-media-b1f8e0fe092f)

