Reputation warfare now targets ordinary people

Attacks on one’s reputation used to be the price that celebrities paid for fame. However, now it is a hazard of ordinary life. Anyone with any standing to lose is vulnerable. If you have an online presence, the damage can spread much further and faster than the truth. Run-of-the-mill bad publicity or harassment might dent your confidence or cause annoyance, but if you become the target of a technologically augmented campaign aimed at destroying your reputation, you could lose much more.

Welcome to the world of reputation operations (rep-ops) — deliberate attempts to erode a target’s credibility and isolate them socially and professionally by strategically amplifying false or maliciously curated information. A rep-op does not aim to persuade one person to distrust another. The primary objective is to change the target’s reputation across networks where credibility, access and influence are the currency of exchange. Success might include colleagues of the victim becoming more guarded, friends pulling back and employers growing suspicious. Reputation is social, and so is the process of destroying it.

Rep-ops use some of the same tactics as Soviet and Russian disinformation and psychological operations (psyops), which were a menace long before the rise of social media. During the Cold War, the Soviets’ Operation Infektion disinformation campaign used fake news to weaken trust in the US and its institutions. In the 1980s, the KGB spread a false claim that the US had covertly engineered the AIDS virus and then blamed Africans for the disease, all part of an effort to tarnish the US’ image as a trustworthy power and sow racial divisions within its borders.

Beginning in 2014, Russia’s Internet Research Agency carried these techniques onto social media. The goal this time was to influence how Americans perceived one another, their political leaders, and their institutions, and ultimately to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election. Far beyond spreading false information, these psyops sought to shape people’s perceptions, attitudes and behavior by creating fake American identities and accounts, posting politically polarizing content, buying advertisements, organizing online groups and staging rallies.

A similar form of manipulation is now used in rep-ops. Just last year, a network of anonymous social-media accounts was mobilized to amplify a false sexual rumor about an 18-year-old University of Mississippi student. Her tragic story confirms that any ordinary person can now be thrust into the limelight, simply because someone wanted it to happen. Reputational warfare is not new, of course. Retaliatory smearing is a common response from powerful institutions that come under attack. If you aim at the king, you should prepare for what might follow, even if you do not miss. After Sinead O’Connor tried to call out child abuse by Catholic clergy, channeling her own household abuse experience into her heart-rending version of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U, she was pilloried. It would be another decade before reporters at the Boston Globe exposed the scale of the problem and the Church’s institutional cover-up.

However, O’Connor was a major international star in the 1990s, the face of one of the most iconic music videos of the MTV era. Today, similar reputational costs are imposed on ordinary people through networked amplification campaigns that move between large social-media accounts and anonymous burner accounts, reaching mass audiences in ways that only celebrities were exposed to before.

Rep-ops always create a spectacle, but they do not necessarily require many spectators. They can even occur offline. After Shaakirrah Sanders, a black law professor at the University of Idaho, raised concerns about racial bias, the law school’s administrators told faculty members that her conduct was “unprofessional, demeaning and potentially dishonest.” They said she had “slandered” colleagues and then encouraged complaints against her. As one dean joked to another: “The administration strikes back.”

The administration then doubled down on this reputational signaling in a manner designed to undercut Sanders’ standing with faculty and students, assigning her to courses she did not want to teach, summarizing her teaching evaluations unfavorably and voting against her tenure. A federal judge later characterized these actions as retaliatory, resulting in a US$750,000 settlement. Reputation is a form of social capital that affects a person’s employment, income, social and professional networks, and access to institutions. Destroying a person’s credibility is sometimes just the work of an obnoxious online troll. However, sometimes it is a calculated defensive move by those facing allegations of wrongdoing. Unable to refute the evidence, they try to refute the accuser. Still other times, it is a tool for winning the competition for attention and influence.

Rep-ops pose a vexing problem, because they demonstrate that one’s standing can be irreparably harmed even with false information. Research on the “continued influence effect” shows that misinformation can shape our thinking even after it has been disproven, and a study this year found that repetition itself increases perceived truth.

Although we have all grown more accustomed to spotting fake news and asking whether something we see online could really be true, rep-ops pose a more subtle problem. Is information being circulated to inform us, or, more dangerously, to change how we and others across the network around us treat another person? Because a loss of reputation is hard to rebuild, and false information hard to correct, rep-ops are greatly damaging to their targets. Once the manipulation and falsehoods are exposed, they might ricochet back on their organizers. However, the damage would have already been done. Such campaigns are socially corrosive, further hollowing out our sense of shared truths amid the broader barrage of disinformation, fake news and psyops.

Carla Norrlof is distinguished professor of global political economy, finance and security at the University of Toronto.