Negative Spaceman

I have a quite unique job and to the best of my knowledge only around 50 people worldwide are actually doing this for a living. Pretty cool, ah?! I am a professional spin hunter and I try to protect our corporate clients in terms of deliberate reputation and image attacks. The irony here is that although the cases of negative reputation campaigns are growing faster, the PR industry in general demonstrate a lack of knowledge about these matters and the way modern communication strategies operate.

Speaking about the issues facing the PR Security industry today, I must also admit that most of the cases are initiated by various kind of information security related problems, all of which aiming to steal or to permanently monitor the sensitive information resources of the target organization. The stolen data is being used as a part of a grater strategical planning, adopting many other techniques, from practices social engineering and competitive intelligence, to pure propaganda. I think it is the right time here to state that Black PR differs significantly from the broader definition of manipulation, where the core persuasion is based on false statements and paid publications. Actually some of the best case studies in BPR are focused on the inconvenient truth and secrets of the target and how they were turned them against it. That is why sometimes the ability to investigate is of a greater value for BPR practitioners than the possession of any special deception skills.

So, negative PR is not propaganda, but both do share some common techniques. Among the classic ones are:

1. Smear

This is one of the simplest and most used propaganda techniques. By definition, smear campaigns are used to undermine the individual’s or group’s reputation and their social credibility. Some people often tend to mistake black public relations campaigns with those of the smear ones. Although they both rely on a very same methodology, there are also some fundamental differences and one of them is that BPR mainly depends on real, factual information while those of smear take advantage of absolute deception and extensive stretching of the truth.

Smears often consist of ad hominem attacks (see below) in the form of unverifiable rumors and are often distortions, half-truths, or even outright lies; smear campaigns are often propagated by gossip spreading. Even when the facts behind a smear are shown to lack proper foundations, the tactic is often effective because the target’s reputation is tarnished before the truth is known.

2. Demonizing the opposition

This political technique is one of the favorites during different types of international crises and political elections and it is pretty easy to be detected. The idea behind it, is to cause a total defamation of the ideological opponents of the attacker. The approach here is mainly verbal and doesn’t interact with the other means of political slander such as behavioral provocation and extensive information gathering.

3. Straw Man

The straw man fallacy occurs when a statement misrepresents or invents an opponent’s view (sometimes even the opponent is invented) in order to easily discredit it. The straw man fallacy does not consist of stating an opponent’s position, but only in stating it inaccurately.

Wikipedia lists several different ways to set up a straw man:

  1. Present one of your opponent’s weaker arguments, refute it, and pretend that you have refuted all of their arguments.
  2. Present your opponent’s argument in weakened form, refute it, and pretend that you have refuted the original.
  3. Present a misrepresentation of your opponent’s position, refute it, and pretend that you have refuted your opponent’s actual position.
  4. Present someone who defends a position poorly as the defender, refute their arguments, and pretend that you’ve refuted every argument for that position.
  5. Invent a fictitious persona with actions or beliefs that are criticised, and pretend that that person represents a group that the speaker is critical of.

4. Obtaining disapproval

The technique is used to get the audience to disapprove an action or idea (usually popular among the competition) by suggesting that the idea is popular with groups hated, feared or held in contempt by the target audience. Thus if a group which supports a policy is led to believe that undesirable, subversive or contemptible people also support it, the members of the group might decide to change their position.

5. Ad Hominem

An ad hominem argument is a fallacy that involves replying to an argument or assertion by attempting to discredit the person offering the argument or assertion.

Simply, it is a refutation of a proposition, based solely upon some unrelated fact about the person presenting the proposition. Such refutation is said to be against the person (ad hominem) and not their proposition. Properly, it consists of saying that an argument is wrong because of something about the individual or organization is in error rather than about the argument itself. Moreover, it is not necessary to insult the individual or organization whose argument is attacked in order to commit the ad hominem attack. Rather, it must be clear that the purpose of the characterization is to discredit the person offering the argument, and, specifically, to invite others to discount his arguments.

The Bottom Line

The techniques above are just a little part of the vast arsenal used by the black hat professionals. Note that they cannot be used separately, but only as a part of intended communication strategy, involving many other means of deliberate defamation.