Seattle City Light Wants A Refund On Their Online Reputation Boosting Bill Funded By Taxpayers

from the streisand-multiplier dept

So let's say you're a highly-paid CEO of Seattle's publically-owned utility company, City Light, and you've just been ironically kicked around in the media for a couple of weeks because you spent public money to boost your own reputation. Let's say that, far from being successful in said reputation-boosting, you're now facing questions over why you spent thousands of dollars to do this in the first place and that now all search results tend to point to this story rather than whatever it was you were originally trying to drown out. What do you do?

You ask for a damned refund, of course. And that's exactly what City Light's chief, Jorge Carrasco, is going to do, even if it has to spend even more public money to get that public money back.

The project was concocted by the CEO’s chief of staff, Sephir Hamilton. In an interview with Ars, Hamilton said that the agency may even file a lawsuit to enforce this refund.

"We're leaving our options open,” he said. “I hope that they'll see that what we signed up for was not the service that they delivered. We were sold one bill of goods and we were given another.”

Ah, yes, the old "spend more public money on a lawsuit to get a refund on the public money we shouldn't have spent" strategy. I like it, not only because it's hilariously recursive, but because it allows for the possibility that City Light loses and the maximum amount of taxpayer money is spent inappropriately. Not that the folks they decided to do business with, Brand.com, seem to be anything remotely resembling reputable (editors note: alliteration combo!).

“We were told that they would provide help in getting some of our past material and news releases placed in reputable blogs and journals and ultimately didn't know that they would be paying for placement or creating fake news websites to place that news,” Hamilton said in an interview. “And ultimately, all of the material that was generated has been taken off search results because it violated Google's policies.”

E-mails from City Light show that Justin DeLisi, a Brand.com campaign manager, provided links to “stories” posted to websites that have since been pulled down and that appear to have been utterly fake. The "whois" information on those domains, which include weeklytimes.com, gazers.com, and advisories.com, is also obscured.

So, just to summarize, City Light, a publically owned utility, paid a shady reputation company thousands of dollars to placate the ego of its CEO and now wants a refund because said shady company wasn't able to produce results. Oh, and they're willing to spend the money to file and fight a lawsuit to get this refund. Look, at some point you just have to stop digging, even if you've legitimately been had. City Light's reputation hasn't been done any favors by any of these actions. Jorge Carrasco may want to take a little bit of advice from himself.

Carrasco said at a press conference that he regretted the entire effort to scrub his online reputation. Hamilton concurred. “It was an experiment that certainly didn't work and we would not do it again,” he told Ars.

Right, so just extend that regret out to this entire situation and stop digging yourself holes. Come on, guys, I don't want to have to write a third post about you.

Filed Under: jorge carrasco, refund, reputation, reputation management, seattle, sephir hamilton
Companies: brand.com, city light

Seattle Taxpayer Money Used To Bolster The Online Reputation Of Utility CEO

from the how'd-that-work-out? dept

We've written previously about this online reputation management thing and how often it backfires. For some reason, there are people out there who somehow think that you can effectively hide your past from the internet instead of understanding both how futile a thing that is to attempt and how horribly it can backfire on you. Celebrities, athletes, and criminals all have been forced to learn this lesson the hard way. But, hey, at least they didn't use taxpayer money in their attempts.

The same can't be said for the city of Seattle, which one paper discovered has been footing the bill for two years worth of internet reputation management of a utility company's CEO.

A newly-published document shows that Seattle’s publicly-owned electrical utility paid thousands of dollars to Brand.com to manage the online reputation of CEO Jorge Carrasco. The document, which was received and published Saturday by the Seattle Times after a public records request, shows that Brand.com charged City Light $5,000 in December 2013.

The report adds that the company actually extended that contract into 2014 and has paid out a total of $17,500, which really sucks considering the utility company is owned by the municipality. Any way you slice it, that sure sounds like thousands of dollars of taxpayer money went to bury some less-than-flattering links about Jorge Carrasco with trumped up positive search results. The most infuriating part of this is that nobody really seems to be able to find anything about Carrasco worth hiding.

It’s not clear what negative stories City Light executives were trying to squash—or whether the utility got any lasting results for its money. Google search results for City Light last week were dominated by news and criticism of Carrasco’s proposed raise. Among the negative headlines from previous years that ranked high in search results was a Seattle Weekly article from 2008 that called Carrasco’s tenure at City Light “polarizing” and described the utility as “beleaguered.”

I mean, people bitching about you getting a raise might not be the most welcome thing ever, but battling that criticism about you getting more money by spending taxpayer money to drown out that criticism may not be the best of plans. Hello Streisand Effect. On top of that silliness, some other folks are getting caught up in the fallout.

"Among the mentions generated for City Light by the deal were blog posts on websites including Huffington Post, which did not disclose they were connected to a paid marketing campaign for the utility," the Times added. The relevant article on the Huffington Post has since been removed. Neither City Light nor Dana Robinson Slote, a city spokeswoman, immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment. Ars did however put in a public records request for these documents.

Yeah, while rules dealing with what must be disclosed and when can tread into silly territory, this is kind of a huge no-no. If larger blogging sources like The Huffington Post are suddenly allowing unacknowledged paid articles to be posted to their site, readers are going to quickly lose trust. If THP received no payment for this article, which is very hard to believe, they will still find readers questioning what else on the site has been bought and paid for.

So way to go, City Light. Once again, attempts to "manage" online reputations results in everyone being worse off. Enjoy that Streisand Effect.

Filed Under: jorge carrasco, reputation management, seattle, taxpayer funds
Companies: brand.com

Dear Famous People: Stop Attempting Online Reputation Scrubbing; I Don't Want To Write Streisand Stories Anymore!

from the no-lessons-learned dept

I've learned a couple of things in my three-plus decades on this planet. First, no matter how hard you try, you're going to piss people off. It's unavoidable, so you're best off not bothering trying to avoid it. Second, people who are pissed off about you are going to talk about it, including on the internet. It's un-quashable, so you're best off not bothering to quash it. Third, the internet may forgive, but it never forgets. You can't force amnesia on the internet, so you're best off not even trying. And, finally, if you're the type of person who likes to ignore those first three lessons, particularly the last, the world is going to be a place of recursive ass-biting. Why can't people, particularly those in the public spotlight who should know better, keep themselves from trying to erase stuff they don't like from the interwebz? Members of government, professional sports tycoons, service companies; the list goes on and on. I'm begging you, all of you, please stop doing this. Because every time you do, I have to sit down at my computer and show the entire world how silly you look. My only motivation for doing so is that maybe, just maybe, I'll write up that single story that finally breaks the dam and from that point on everybody will understand the Streisand Effect and stop behaving so insipidly.

Here to demonstrate why that hasn't happened yet is a big fat list of people who decided that secretively engaging, what New York Magazine calls "black-ops reputation management" firms to scrub their public embarrassments from the web, would be a good idea, ostensibly never foreseeing the day when what they were up to would be reported. It began with one reporter's interest in Samuel "Phin" Upham, a man indicted for cheating the IRS out of taxes by hiding money in Zurich, accused of conspiring with his mother who set up a fake nonprofit entity, and supposedly surreptitiously ferreting money all around the world. Graeme Wood, who had gone to college breifly with Upham, set up a Google alert for his name, since Google searches were already rife with unflattering information. That's when the strangeness began.

Every alert email Wood received seemed to be glowingly positive, from reports of employment appointments, to articles on philosophy, to tales of Upham's philanthropic works. When Wood dug a bit deeper, cracks in this facade of positive news emerged.

But something was wrong with these sites, which in every case looked flimsy and temporary, especially when you got beyond the first page. Venture Cap Monthly listed a number of prominent writers as "authors," including the Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell, Fast Company journalist Danielle Sacks, and Slate critic-at-large Stephen Metcalf. Caldwell and Sacks write about business, so I could imagine—barely—that by contributing to an obscure site, they might be slumming for a paycheck. But I couldn't make any sense of the presence of Metcalf, who had written a scintillating essay about the films of Tom Cruise, I remembered, but nothing that would interest a venture capitalist.

Now each ping made me a little more suspicious. None of the articles by or about Phin mentioned donations, which I expected would be a major aspect of philanthropic work for someone who came from a family rich enough to hide $11 million from the Feds. And when I looked at Charity News Forum (another curiously bare site, more like a derelict blog), I saw that Phin's name was listed as a contributor alongside a few semi-prominent voices in philanthropy, as well as … the journalist Ron Rosenbaum? That seemed odd, given that Rosenbaum doesn't write regularly about philanthropy and is best known for a book about Hitler.

What Wood ended up with after further digging was a list of 33 websites that had been almost certainly created only to funnel good news about certain individuals into search engine results. It was a sham Upham's mother would have been proud of, the creation of fake entities for likely fraudulent purposes. Still not satisfied, Wood dug into the HTML code for the sites, looking for an author. He couldn't find one there, but the metadata did reveal more names alongside Upham's.

I noticed other names thrown in incongruously: Joe Ricketts, Helen Lee Schifter, Irena Briganti, Antonio Weiss, and Luke Weil. I also noticed the same Wikipedia editor, Belkin555, had tidied the entries of several of them. A few were powerful people with no apparent scandals to cover up: Joe Ricketts was the founder of TD Ameritrade, and Antonio Weiss runs investment banking for Lazard. Others, judging by the unforgiving kliegs of a Google search, had left much messier trails on the web.

For reference, if I had to guess, I'd suppose any interest Ricketts might have in internet-scrubbing would be related to either the slight controversy surrounding his PAC against President Obama in the last election cycle, or perhaps his staunch position against tax money going to private entities while his children were asking for exactly that as owners of the Chicago Cubs and the Wrigley Field renovation project. Neither being big deals, in my estimation, but I can understand his discomfort. Schifter has been the subject of some unflattering reports on her personal life. Irena Briganti is a PR flack for Fox News with something of an online reputation. Luke Weil sued a filmmaker over a documentary on children of very wealthy families and has also been accused of assaulting a music producer and his girlfriend, spending time in jail for the latter.

Now, none of the above is, as I mentioned, the kind of damning information that would normally get my trousers off. Add a little attempted cover up to the mix, however, and suddenly intrigue is introduced and everyone comes out looking slimy. That all of this positive online press appeared to be coming from a single source, an unknown entity called "Xander Fields", made it all the more intriguing. Which, of course, sent Wood digging further. He eventually found a company called Metal Rabbit Media and Bryce Tom, the man behind the company. Tom informed Wood of how the service worked, filling search engines with white noise releases to cover up his clients' dark pasts, all for upwards of $10k per month.

And the point is that five-figures per month is a great deal of money to pay for something that most likely won't work, is dishonest, and will ultimately making you look far worse in the end. I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: the cover up is always worse than the crime. Some of the folks listed above did some things that will make some people mad. Not horrible things, but perhaps they are unflattering. Still, most people don't care. Try to cover those things up, however, and now you have a great many people who will think that's shifty and will wonder what else you're trying to hide, assuming the attempted cover up comes to light. Which it almost certainly will, on a long enough timeline.

So, please, again, stop trying to game the internet. It won't work and I'm tired of writing these stories.

Filed Under: antonio weiss, christopher caldwell, danielle sacks, helen lee schifter, irena briganti, joe ricketts, luke weil, reputation management, reputation scrubbing, samuel upham, stephen metcalf, streisand effect

'Internet Lawyer' Charles Carreon Has A New Best Friend And He's An SEO Expert Who Hates Anonymous Critics

from the the-streisand-school-of-reputation-management dept

The internet makes for some strange bedfellows. The fact that I can't think of any other examples right at the moment should not detract from this truism. Internet = strange bedfellows and we all know it. Here's some proof:

This article is about the importance of having a great Internet Attorney.

I have one, and he is my friend and an outstanding Internet Attorney that has done wonderful work that protects me and helps me grow our business. His name is Charles Carreon, and I highly recommend him based on the merit of his outstanding work.

Go ahead and re-read those sentences. Marvel at the fact that they were written post-Oatmeal-meltdown (March 22 of this very year). Gaze in bemusement at the proximity of the name "Charles Carreon" to the phrase "outstanding work." Gather your jaw from the floor when you realize an SEO expert with an interest in reputation management put that sentence together and displayed it publicly without a hint of irony.

This glowing testimonial was dropped in my lap via an Adam Steinbaugh tweet. (Steinbaugh has done some great work pursuing the Craig Brittain/IsAnybodyDown.com "revenge porn" story.)

Looks like Charles Carreon hired an SEO guy. Article about unmasking critics probably not the best way to start. gototom2.blogspot.com/2013/03/charle…

— Adam Steinbaugh (@goodreverend) March 24, 2013

As Steinbaugh points out, Tom Forrest, the author of this bizarre puff piece, is particularly irked by some anonymous commenters who have complained about his SEO business, HTP Company. We'll get to that in a moment, but let's take a break to hear more about this "Charles Carreon - Internet Lawyer."

I can tell you from personal legal experience and several law suits I have had to file, that this is a "Pay me a smaller amount now, or Pay a big old bag of money later" proposition.

We know you think you are saving money by not hiring a Lawyer to take care of this, then years later when you are in a law suit you wish you would have listened to previous good legal advice and properly protected your Internet assets...

You want and need an Attorney that has many years of strong experience doing this, and Charles Carreon is this type of Attorney.

There you have it. "Charles Carreon" and "years of strong experience" contained in the same sentence, possibly opening the door to an alternate universe where Internet Lawyer Charles Carreon's reputation hasn't been thoroughly dismantled by Internet Lawyer Charles Carreon.

After shoving a few words together in an approximation of a paragraph, Forrest moves on to his real area of concern.

Today a hot topic of Law and SEO is the strange and difficult issue of reputation management. How do we know what to believe on the Internet when we have sites like RipOffReport and Yelp, etc.

Oh! I know! Pick me!

We know what to believe by considering the experiences of others, something both these sites collect. True, one is more slanted than the other, and generously-sized grains of salt should be taken with every exceedingly negative/positive review, but both are handy additions to any consumer's "toolkit."

Forrest isn't done with RipOffReport, though.

I have talked and emailed with Ed the owner of RipOffReport, and even though his believes and morals on this topic are different then mine and frankly Ed's position (the owner of RipOffReport) upsets me. He is a very clever guy with a good team of Attorneys that fight everyone as long and as hard as they can so he does not give out any information about who files the reports.

Not only is he clever, but he has some protection via Section 230, something people who complain about people complaining should familiarize themselves with. No one should feel compelled to give up info about a critical commenter just because someone else is upset. RipOffReport gives every complained-about company ample room to respond. But, if you're one of those types who feels the best defense is a good lawsuit -- that's where Internet Lawyer Charles Carreon comes in.

This is where you need a good Attorney if a lot of money is on the line and you need to legaly force RipOffReport to disclose information about who really wrote the complaints. It will cost you at least $20,000 and most likely much more to prove who wrote something negative and false about your company, and then to take them to Court and collect will cost even more money, at least $50,000.

Or, you know, save all that money and respond with evidence that the claim is false, using links, citations and other information. It's a whole lot cheaper and it keeps you from being portrayed as a thin-skinned legal bully, something Internet Lawyer Charles Carreon has some first-hand experience with.

Now, Internet Lawyering is good and all, but sometimes you gotta be your own pimp.

So this is not an inexpensive endeavor, it is less expensive to hire a good SEO company to push down the negative and perhaps false articles and complaints. This can also work the other way, you can push up negative complaint articles about your competitors if you so desire.

Also an option. Or you could consider handling complaints in a courteous, professional manner. Your choice.

Now, while this is both extremely bizarre and rather entertaining, one wonders exactly how strong Tom's SEO-fu is if he's unaware of Internet Lawyer Charles Carreon's problematic relationship with the Internet. Or maybe this is a weird symbiotic relationship. After all, Carreon would need the services of a top "reputation manager" just to bring his credibility level up to "dubious" or "somewhat suspect." Bundling reputation management, SEO jargon and Charles "Streisand" Carreon in the same post leads one to believe that either Forrest is blissfully unaware of Carreon's actions or they're both teaming up to unmask some critics and drag their respective reputations out of the mud. Whatever the real answer is, it bears watching, with popcorn on standby.

Filed Under: charles carreon, reputation management, seo, tom forrest
Companies: htp company

DMCA As Censorship: Site Reposts Articles About Disgraced Researcher, Claims Copyright, Has Originals Removed

from the incredible dept

I first heard about the excellent site RetractionWatch via a segment on On the Media. The RetractionWatch site, put together by Reuters Health executive editor (and doctor) Ivan Oransky and Anesthesiology News managing editor Adam Marcus, does what you'd expect from the name. It covers scientific research that is retracted. Since there have been an increasing numbers of stories of academic research fraud exposed, and the pair felt that the "retractions" often were buried, despite questionable circumstances, they started collecting such information. It's a really useful site.

Yesterday, however, they pointed to something odd happening. They were alerted, via their hosting company Automattic (who runs WordPress.com), that it had received a DMCA takedown notice concerning ten posts they had done about researcher Anil Potti. They found that odd, considering that the content they write is original. WordPress has removed all ten posts. When RW asked for the details of the DMCA notice, they received the following (with the URLs to be taken down removed to keep it readable):

First Name: Narendra
Last Name: Chatwal
Company Name: News Bullet
Address Line 1: Plot No 15 & 16, Express Trade Tower
Address Line 2: Archana Complex
City: Noida
State/Region/Province: Utter Pradesh
Zip/Postal Code: 201302
Country: India
Telephone Number: 8953171759
Copyright holder you represent (if other than yourself):
Please describe the copyrighted work so that it may be easily identified: Hello WordPress Team,

Myself Narendra Chatwal Senior editor in NewsBulet.In, a famous news firm in India. All the news we publish are individually researched by our reporters from all over India and then we publish them on our site and our news channel. Recently we found that some one had copied our material from the category Medical Reviews and published them on their site. So we request you to help us in protecting our content and copy right.

Thanks & Regards,

Narendra Chatwal
NewsBulet.In
Location (URL) of the unauthorized material on a WordPress.com site (NOT simply the primary URL of the site – example.wordpress.com; you must provide the full and exact permalink of the post, page, or image where the content appears, one per line) :

[list of 10 URLs]

If the infringement described above is represented by a third-party link to a downloadable file (e.g. http://rapidshare.com/files/…), please provide the URL of the file (one per line):

I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.: Yes

I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.: Yes

Signed on this date of (today’s date, MM/DD/YYYY): 02/02/2013

Signature (your digital signature is legally binding): Narendra Chatwal

As the folks at RW note, while their content was, in fact, also showing on NewsBulet.in, almost everything else is suspect. The content was clearly originally from RW, and reposted to NewsBulet.in. As they note:

In other words, NewsBulet.In is violating our copyright; we are not violating theirs. That’s driven home by the fact that the site did not exist until October 2012, according to a WhoIs search. All but one of the Retraction Watch posts they cite appeared before they even existed.

While all of the links to the NewsBulet.in site in the original DMCA takedown now lead you to a 403 Forbidden error message, it's pretty clear that the site copied all of RW's content and then filed a DMCA takedown to get the originals down.

John Timmer, over at Ars Technica, dug into the story and provides significant background information that suggests what is likely to have happened. Timmer's story notes that RW had published a bunch of stories (22 in all) about Potti, and much of it is about his downfall and disgrace:

One of the cases they followed was Anil Potti, a cancer researcher who, at the time, worked at Duke University. Potti first fell under scrutiny for embellishing his resume, but the investigation quickly expanded as broader questions were raised about his research. As the investigation continued, a number of Potti's papers ended up being retracted as accusations of falsified data were raised. Eventually, three clinical trials that were started based on Potti's data were stopped entirely. Although federal investigations of Potti's conduct are still in progress, he eventually resigned from Duke.

However, Timmer also points out that Potti has since been hired at the University of North Dakota and (perhaps more importantly) has hired an "online reputation management" firm to try to clean up his name. That company has been trying to get "positive" stories to show up higher in searches for Potti's name:

No longer do the majority of top search results for the former Duke cancer researcher detail allegations that he falsified his resume and produced faulty research that has been retracted from renowned medical journals and led to the termination of three clinical trials. Instead, more than a dozen websites and social media accounts created in the months following Dr. Potti’s November resignation contain solely positive information about his research and medical experience.

“During his time at Duke, he had a special interest in taking care of patients with lung cancer and contributed to the development of several programs in cancer,” reads a section of AnilPotti.com, which does not discuss the terminated trials that a top Duke official has since said should never have been conducted.

Of course, a current Google search on Potti's name shows that the Retraction Watch stories are actually very prominent these days, even beating out that anilpotti.com site that the reputation management firm helped create. Here's a screenshot: Timmer's article further notes that, while the front page of NewsBulet.in appears like a normal news site, the claims from "Chatwal" that it is "original reporting" are not supported, and other stories on the site appear to be copied from third party sources as well.

Of course, what's not clear is who actually posted the content to NewsBulet.in and what the plan is. But, it certainly suggests some very questionable behavior from someone who wanted the stories about Anil Potti on RetractionWatch to disappear. RW's Oransky is hoping that it's all just some big mistake, rather than an intentional plan to sabotage RW. As he told Timmer: "We can only hope that this isn't an attempt to keep us from reporting on retractions and scientific fraud." Somehow, I get the feeling this story isn't over yet...

In the meantime, however, RetractionWatch has filed a counternotice, and one hopes that as this story gets attention, Automattic will speed up their review process and restore the original stories in a shorter timeframe than the required 10 business days. As of the writing of this post, the originals are still down, which is unfortunate.

Either way, this is exactly the kind of thing that concerns us about making it easy to take down content with copyright claims. It is bound to be used as a censorship tool, because it becomes too easy for many to abuse the process to take down content they just don't like. Considering the ability to hit back at false takedowns is extremely limited, we're just going to see more and more examples like this.

Filed Under: adam marcus, anil potti, censorship, dmca, ivan oransky, reputation management, retraction watch, takedown