A Reflection on My New Book, WHAT HAPPENED TO NINA? by Dervla McTiernan
My new book, WHAT HAPPENED TO NINA?, is out very soon, and I’m bracing myself, just a little, that some readers might think some parts of the story are a little far-fetched. If they do, I’m prepared with my rebuttal argument!
At the beginning of the story, twenty-year old Nina Fraser goes away for a weekend with her boyfriend, Simon Jordan, and only Simon comes home. He has an explanation for what happened, but his explanation is full of holes, and when Nina doesn’t come back, her parents go to the police, who question Simon. Simon’s parents hire a defence lawyer, but they also immediately hire a PR firm that specialises in ‘reputation management’. The firm immediately launches a vicious, no-limits online campaign spreading lies, rumours and accusations in every direction but at Simon, in an effort to protect him and to muddy the waters.
Sounds a little unrealistic? Maybe, at first glance … but my research suggests that, if anything, I’ve gone a bit light. There are PR firms just like the one in my book operating in the murky shadows. Most of them are very careful, and very discrete, but enough of them have been caught in the act at this stage that we can clearly see the tactics they use to clean up the reputations of their shady clients.
In 2023, the Washington Post did a major expose on Spanish firm, Eliminalia, which operated in fifty countries. According to the Washington Post, between 2015 and 2021, Eliminalia used bogus copyright claims to get unflattering articles about their clients removed from search engines and web hosting companies. The company also produced thousands of fake fluff articles, and placed them online. Eliminalia piggybacked off the websites of government agencies and respected universities to make their articles appear legitimate so that fluff articles appeared first in any search results.
And to be clear, we’re not talking about small stakes stuff here. Eliminalia’s clients, just to name a few, included a TV personality accused of sexual misconduct, an entrepreneur charged with hiring a hit man to kill a business associate, the leader of a major religious charity, and a well-known travelling circus clown who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year old girl in Switzerland.
Eliminalia isn’t the only PR firm to cross ethical lines in spectacular fashion. In the US, a subsidiary of PR giant Publicis Group agreed to pay $350 million to settle allegations that its ad campaign pushing Oxycontin on behalf of Perdue Pharma involved ‘predatory and deception marketing strategies.’ And in the UK, Bell Pottinger, at one point one of the most powerful PR firms in the world, has become a cautionary tale. Operating in South Africa on behalf of the powerful and wealthy Gupta family, Bell Pottinger created false news articles encouraging racial animosity which benefited the Gupta’s business interests. In a sting by journalists, Bell Pottinger also admitted manipulating SEO results so that countries accused of human rights allegations would have their reputations laundered — negative stories dropped down the results, and puff pieces appeared.
When its activities in South Africa were exposed, Bell Pottinger was pushed into administration. Eliminalia appears to have disappeared or to have morphed into something else. Publicis Group continues to operate, and I guess they’re doing okay — the group is worth in the region of twenty-five billion at last count. We can hope that they’ve cleaned up their act. But how many other firms are out there, working in the murky grey to quietly manipulate what we read and what we see online? It seems to me that reputation laundering is a growth industry, operating across international boundaries, and all but impossible to regulate.
I’m not sure that we fully realise how unreliable most online sources have become. It seems to me that ten years ago, search results online yielded results that were largely true, or at least, trying to be true. Today, it feels like the opposite. I don’t trust online review sites, because they are so obviously manipulated. The platform formerly known as Twitter is drowning in hate speech, trash ads and misinformation. Even Google is becoming less and less useful. I’m interested to see what the next phase of the internet will become. The appetite for outrage is out there, yes, but the appetite for reliable information is greater. I hope we figure out a way to serve it.
For more by Dervla McTiernan, visit her website.
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