# 22. Reputation Control ## 22.1. Definition This is a group of manipulative techniques used to control the public reputation of a person, group, or institution. The reputation of an individual or an institution is important, because it may determine whether or not they are trusted or accepted by the public or a peer group. Reputation as a criterion deals basically with the trustworthiness of an individual or institution when measured against a particular set of cultural standards of respectability, reliability, and other standards of honour. Damage to one's reputation has long been held to be a grave issue. As Shakespeare put it in Othello: > "Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, > Is the immediate jewel of their souls. > Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; > 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands; > But he that filches from me my good name > Robs me of that which not enriches him, > And makes me poor indeed. Reputation is an issue of public rather than private perception; therefore the consequences of a "poor reputation" can be very damaging publicly. Reputation control is known to be a ubiquitous, spontaneous and highly efficient mechanism of social control in society. It is a subject of study in social and management sciences. Having a "good" reputation amongst peers is considered important to the success of members of a group. Reputation control acts on different levels, both individual and "supra-individual". At the supra-individual level, it concerns groups, communities, collectives and abstract social entities (such as firms, corporations, organisations, countries, cultures and even civilisations). It affects phenomena of hugely different scales, from interpersonal relationships in everyday life to diplomatic relationships between nations. Reputation control is a very obvious opportunity for manipulative agencies because a manipulator has many possibilities to negatively alter the reputation of a victim, quite safely, at long distance if necessary, with a very low risk. Similarly, reputation control provides many opportunities for the manipulator to positively adjust the reputation of an individual. Conversely, the ease of access and relatively low risk of reputation control also provides opportunities for both avoidance and counteraction. ## 22.2. Persistence Short to Long. A damaged reputation can survive through centuries. Let's take the case of Richard III, Britain's most reviled king. History belongs to the victors and this is aptly demonstrated in the case of Richard III, the hunchbacked king demonised by Shakespeare as a man so "rudely stamp'd" that "dogs bark at me as I halt by them". The last Plantagenet monarch fell at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, after which his body was said to have been stripped and publicly displayed for several days. Some accounts reported that his corpse was tipped into the local river; others said he was given a Christian burial at Greyfriars monastery. Richard's name became synonymous with evil deeds, epitomised by later accounts that he ordered the murder of his boy nephews, the two "Princes in the tower". The hatchet job on Richard was perfected by Shakespeare, who preserved the dead king's image as a "bottled spider" with a twisted body – a pantomime villain. Historians do not know what happened to the two princes, except that they disappeared from the Tower in 1483. Some historians also point out that during Richard's reign he oversaw some important and progressive changes, such as the command to all judges that they administer the law impartially. Nonetheless Richard III's reputation remains shot to pieces. Strangely, the recent discovery of the bones of Richard, have elicited some resistance from the present Queen of England and the Anglican Church for DNA testing of the corpses of the two princes in Westminster Abbey. Is the British royal establishment worried that some "unfortunate" fact may be revealed? For instance, could the bodies of the children buried in the marble vessel in Westminster not actually be Richard's nephews at all, in which case, we have all been the victim of an enormous manipulation lasting almost 600 years - and someone knows it. ## 22.3. Accessibility Low to High. ## 22.4. Conditions/Opportunity/Effectiveness There are two possible objectives in manipulative reputation control: - To damage the reputation of a subject. - To enhance the reputation of a subject. There are many ways to alter a subject's reputation, creating and/or propagating a good or bad personal history of the subject, spreading rumours etc. We will deal with the methodology in more detail later in the chapter. However, it's important to understand that interference with a subject's reputation is very effective because it is very hard to reverse in the public perception. So even after a character assassination attempt on a subject is totally disproved, it often continues to linger and taint the victim's reputation. The same is also true of reputation-enhancing manipulations. Once a subject is considered to have a good reputation, it is often hard to dislodge the idea in the mind of the public ### 22.4.1. Conditions Both objectives of reputation enhancement or reputation damage rely on altering the information available to the public about the subject. Therefore it is essential to have access to the information sources used by the public. In the past these sources were confined to word of mouth, books and the conventional media. Today, we have the internet and generalised direct access to potentially vast parts of the global general public, without having to use 3rd party media. The spread of social networking has also automated the concept of "word of mouth" communication so that reputation control is now well and truly in the technological forefront of manipulative techniques. We can idolise someone or rip them to pieces in the space of a few minutes in this virtual world. ### 22.4.2. Opportunity The opportunities for managing (or damaging) reputations have never been greater. The corollary of this is also true: the quality of information used in determining a subject's reputation has never been less reliable. The internet is constantly used by interested parties to massage consumer impressions and it is a perfect conduit for manipulating a reputation. The democratic nature of the internet also ensures that it can be used by both manipulator and victim. But it also means that we can defend our reputations and launch counterattacks quite easily using just the same medium. So the internet and strength of media fire-power may be key factors in reputation control and not just a source of fundamental facts about someone. ### 22.4.3. Traditional methods of reputation control Originally reputation was based on word of mouth descriptions of an individual's behaviour. In Western societies it centred on whether the individual behaved in an honourable way when judged against some Christian ethical standards. Later, reputations were made and broken by those who controlled the printing presses. Thus, wealthy individuals found it important to have control of parts of the press or at least have very reliable contacts in the media. This control of the media allowed these elites to control their own and others' reputations in the eyes of the general public. And so this allowed for a person or company to be perceived as "decent", "highly trustworthy", "efficient", "well-financed", "dynamic", "generous" or whatever adjective was appropriate to the reputation controller. Pandora's Box of manipulative opportunities had been opened. A very cosy "closed shop" of wealth, influence, corporate power and media control began to prevail in modern industrial society, basically replacing the system of functional dissemination of information used in the middle ages. Since the conquest of the media by establishment capitalism, only rarely has the link between establishment power and the media been interrupted by the occasional scurrilous press attacking a reputation here or there. In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, draconian libel laws favouring the libel victim rather than public interest or the rights of the journalist to investigate, have hampered investigative journalism and our knowledge of the backgrounds of our leaders. ### 22.4.4. Revolutionary changes in reputation control However, all that changed after the arrival of the internet. Almost overnight, we moved from a moribund system of establishment and capital controlled media to a completely open, anarchic, cheap and totally democratic system of open communication. Anyone can open a newspaper now, or a radio or TV station. Anyone can make and publish a movie, a book, a documentary or a bunch of photographs. We can publish our suspicions at will on an internet that is essentially without any form of censorship. And this "revolution" continues to open access to ordinary people to this new media. News now travels straight from the smart phone on the street to the internet and via social networks to potentially millions of viewers. A policeman beating up a demonstrator in Delhi is now transmitted instantaneously across the globe. There is no time and no opportunity for any kind of censorship. News is "out there" without even being replayed, without editing. It is truly "live news". The torturers of the streets, police or criminal, are not only revealed but are exposed in real time and witnessed by millions, their acts frozen forever in YouTube or endless other repositories of daily life. We live in a world where the oppressed are making documentaries about their oppressors and broadcasting them real-time and globally. These huge changes in accessibility to a global media do provide opportunities for manipulative reputation control. But they also provide a means of redress as well, never before possible unless you happened to belong to one of the powerful elites or own a newspaper. **Internet technology and reputation control:** Here are some examples of how a reputation can now be controlled using these new technologies: - **Corporate slander:** A corporation may be given a poor review in order to damage its share price (or vice versa). The use of tip sheets is totally uncontrolled on the internet. Similar systems of reputation control can be used to discredit a book, a hotel, a movie, a restaurant or an album using bad internet reviews. - **Exclude employment:** Employers can search for potential employees on the internet, looking for undesirable material and build up profiles of candidates which may disqualify them from possible positions. Employees thus excluded from a job should count themselves lucky not to have been employed by such a paranoid organisation. - **Mud-slinging:** Manipulators may use social media or blogs to malign or compliment an individual, a company, an institution, or a government. - **Rumour mongering:** Carefully coordinated attacks can cause the rapid spread of rumours or "facts" across vast numbers of internet users. - **Unfortunate connections:** The manipulation of SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques can force associations to occur between certain data, like a victim and a criminal activity. - **Innuendos:** The bending of truth and the use of innuendo in static articles on websites and blogs can alter public perceptions of a subject over long periods of time. - **Anonymous Libel:** A manipulator can easily sidestep legal considerations by using anonymous methods of delivery of potentially libellous material to a blog, social networking site or website using techniques like "Tor", which provides anonymous access to the internet. - **Counterattack is possible:** Individuals can also now openly defend themselves on the internet against any libellous attacks. ## 22.5. Methodology/Refinements/Sub-species *See Child Pages:* - [[Dirty Hands]] - [[Doxing]] - [[Echo Chamber]] - [[Halo Effect]] - [[Pandering]] ## 22.6. Avoidance and Counteraction The first issue of course is recognising that someone is manipulating a reputation. When this has been confirmed, the next question is, does this matter to you? If it does impact on you, the next step is to find out how the effects of this can be avoided and counteracted. ### 22.6.1. Detection Deliberate interference with the information which builds up a reputation is difficult to detect. However, by carrying out a lot of research it is usually possible to build up an extensive picture of all the contributory information which constitutes a reputation. If this body of information is consistent and coming from reliable sources, then one can assume that a reputation is reliable. If, however, the research reveals large inconsistencies or a bias towards overtly negative or positive information coming from unreliable sources, then it would be fair to assume that someone (the manipulator) is interfering with the source information which constitutes the reputation. It's not a precise science but strong correlations will tend to show up when someone is trying to deliberately damage or elevate a reputation. ### 22.6.2. Avoidance Controlling external reputation control: For most of us these days, our personal reputations are embedded in the public domain via the internet. Most of what is there is inaccurate, incomplete, biased and misleading but there it sits, representing us to the outside world: to employers, friends, and professional colleagues, family, everyone in fact, until we contradict it or knock it off the top place of a search engine listing. A whole industry has grown up now in helping people clean up their internet image. Even if we have no real internet presence, we still show up as people with the same name or via credit check agencies using our names to fish for customers. The only sure way to guard against internet misrepresentation is not to use the internet at all. But, for most of us this is tantamount to sealing up the letter-box at home to avoid receiving unpleasant mail. It is not the solution. The alternative solution is to stay on top of your interactions with the internet: - Don't publish more about yourself than is absolutely necessary - Make your identity ambiguous by altering personal information so that a viewer can never be sure of the validity of the data. - Don't use social networks - or at least not as someone identifiable. Use abstract or corporate identities if absolutely essential. - In the event of an attack on your own reputation via the internet, then use the internet to respond and make sure the responses are fully search engine optimised so that any future search engine queries arrive at your rebuttal page before they arrive at the original accusations. - Use anonymous domain registrations so as to avoid detection as a domain owner. ### 22.6.3. Counteraction If a manipulator is acting to damage your reputation in some way, firstly you must make sure that your rebuttal is readily available via conventional and internet media. Then the simple solution is to attack the manipulator in exactly the same way, if possible attacking their good name and reputation. The cost of the manipulator's actions against you, the victim, must begin to exceed the benefits that they are getting or expect to gain from damaging you.