By Quentin Langley
Fake brandjacks are not new. They have existed in social media as long as social media have existed, and conspiracy theories have been around even longer than that.
A fake brandjack is – as the name suggests – a false story spread about a company, person or organization designed to undermine that entity’s reputation.
In my book, one example examined is a hit job on McDonalds. It shows a photoshopped sign in a McDonalds window announcing that African American customers will henceforth be charged higher prices.
Social media memes open themselves to this sort of attack. Anyone can put together a meme. All you need is a picture of someone and a fake quote next to them. Maybe you should mock up a tweet. None of this is hard, and some of these stories can be spread rapidly.
Snopes.com has a great example of an attack on Melania Trump claiming that she plagiarized Michelle Obama in a statement on Women’s History Month. Two photographs; two nearly identical quotes; two dates for the alleged statements. Neither statement is accurate, and when you put the real statements side by side they are not especially similar, beyond including the phrase “Women’s History Month”.
What makes some fake brandjacks spread and others not so much?
A successful fake brandjack needs to have some resonance, at least to some people. That may not mean much beyond the fact that there’s a dedicated group of haters out there who will spread the meme: people who will believe almost anything about the target, or perhaps not believe it, but who will spread it anyway.
That’s obviously true of McDonalds. A meme suggesting that Whole Foods Market or Starbucks was to introduce racist pricing would not gain traction.
It is true of almost any political figure, but in this case Melania Trump is particularly vulnerable. Her speech to the 2016 Republican Convention actually did bear some similarities to Michelle Obama’s speech eight years earlier.
Of course some rumors about political leaders and their families are not true. Allegations about Donald Trump or members of his campaign colluding with Russia have not been fully investigated, but certainly his three predecessors were the victim of insane conspiracy theories. And so were all the presidents before that. Some people claim that the ‘birther’ conspiracy theory against Barack Obama was somehow unique and reflects deep racism in some parts of the US. It was actually nowhere near as vicious as the theory that George W Bush plotted 9/11 or that Bill Clinton had Vince Foster murdered. It wasn’t even the first “birther” theory. The same allegation was made about Chester A Arthur.
The difference, of course, is that until Bill Clinton became president, the drunken bore at the back of the bar only had access to a few people at once. Now he has Twitter.
Comments