Facebook Busted in Clumsy Smear Attempt on Google. Transcendence, starring Johnny Depp, is the latest in a series of Hollywood films with what you might call a transhumanist flair. Other recent movies exploring the symbiosis of man and machine and our relationship with technology include the Robocop remake and Her. What we are seeing is the mainstream finally flirting with some of the headiest ideas in the history of the world, reflecting our need to grapple with the implications of a world sustained by increasingly powerful technologies, and a redefinition of what it means to be human. I suppose the main argument goes like this: We are no longer subject to Darwinian natural selection.
Exponentially powerful technologies are transforming our sphere of possibilities. What it means to be human is up for grabs. We have taken the reigns of natural selection to become the chief agents of the evolutionary process. But this is nothing new. Shakespeare was on it when he wrote: “We know what we are, we know not what we may be.” Google deflects PR firm's attack of Gmail privacy. By Byron Acohido and Jon Swartz, USA TODAY Updated 5/10/2011 2:14 PM | It's not as if Google lacks privacy controversies to quell. By Paul Sakuma, AP file By Paul Sakuma, AP file Yet Burson-Marsteller, a top-five public relations firm, is attempting to pile more on.
Burson last week stepped up a whisper campaign to get top-tier media outlets, including USA TODAY, to run news stories and editorials about how an obscure Google Gmail feature — Social Circle — ostensibly tramples the privacy of millions of Americans and violates federal fair trade rules. Google said that Social Circle in fact allows Gmail users to make social connections based on public information and private connections across its products in ways that don't skirt privacy.
Yet the PR stunt played out during a week in which Google was responding to a raid of its Seoul office by South Korean privacy regulators and was preparing for a U.S. Meanwhile, Google began fielding media calls about the heretofore obscure Social Circle. The e-mails. Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google. Facebook secretly hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google, says Dan Lyons in a jaw dropping story at the Daily Beast.
For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.” Not good. The source emails are here. Facebook hired a PR agency to dish the dirt on Google. But it backfired. - TNW Facebook. Smear Story Source Speaks.
By Ben Popper 5/12/11 9:24am Share this: Privacy advocate Christopher Soghoian broke open the story of how Facebook tried to use global PR giant Burson-Marsteller to smear Google in the press. He was pitched to ghost-write the op-ed, but posted the email exchange online instead. In his first interview since the story broke, he describes the strange chain of events, the laughable notion of Facebook criticizing anyone on privacy and how USA Today almost got the story wrong. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation. So how did this all begin? Well I wasn’t the only one who got this pitch to write an op-ed about Google, a bunch of privacy advocates here in D.C. did.
Did you agree with the argument about what Google was doing? I would never have agreed to the pitch no matter what, but I was surprised at the case they were trying to make. So why did they come to you? So what was Facebook thinking? Does this kind of thing happen a lot. Follow Ben Popper via RSS. REMOnline.com Undo. Facebook, You’re Going To Need A Better Answer For Your Slimeball Stunt. At this point, I think it’s pretty clear what Facebook’s strategy for this whole Burson-Marsteller caught-with-their-pants-down situation is going to be: say as little as possible and move on. And it will work.
Like it or not, Facebook is too integrated into the fabric of the web now for everyone to just walk away. As has been proven time and time again, people will get really angry with them for some misstep, and then totally forget about it a week later. So this is the smart play by Facebook. But it doesn’t mean it’s the right one. While Burson-Marsteller came out and gave a bone-headed statement that essentially threw Facebook under the bus, Facebook has only given a one paragraph canned answer in response to publications like LA Times and The New York Times (which sure was soft in their headline on the matter, huh?). No ‘smear’ campaign was authorized or intended. I’m not sure I’ve ever read something so disingenuous.
Here we go: Facebook Smear Campaign Has No Lasting Impact on Facebook or Google [STATS] Despite major blowback from a Facebook-funded smear campaign against Google meant to raise questions about Google's privacy settings, the perception of neither company has been significantly damaged. According to data from social media analytics firm NetBase, which processed data from more than 70,000 news stories, blogs and forum posts, tweets and comments on social networks, the sentiment about both companies changed very little in the aftermath of the news. Negative sentiment about Facebook — particularly mentions that also included Google — rose May 11, the evening the news broke, and peaked the next day. But by May 13, sentiment was largely positive again, and by May 17 sentiment about Facebook had returned to its pre-smear levels even when mentioned with Google. Google, it appears, was hardly affected. Woe to the 24-hour news cycle and our short attention spans, I suppose.
Facebook Net SentimentClick for full-size view. Facebook Sentiment, When Mentioned With Google.