The Battle Between Internet Giants Google And Facebook Takes A Scandalous Turn

Monday, 23 May 2011 02:58

Written by Resti Reyes. Jr.

In the past week and a half, the internet has been abuzz about a leaked series of emails. No it is not another Wikileaks episode involving issues of national security, but it is of equal if not greater, gargantuan proportions. It has not gotten a lot of press locally, but the local blogger community has been following the story day in day out for the past week or so.

The issue involves subscriber security. But the scandal involves the use of a perfectly legitimate marketing tool – public relations – for not so legitimate means or purposes. As of this writing, Facebook has already come clean and admitted that yes, they did hired one of the biggest PR companies in the world, Burson-Marsteller, to do a demolition job on Facebook. This is one for the books – when a tech titan goes into the dirty tricks department and gets caught red-handed, what happens next? The general observation is… So far, nothing. Not yet anyway. It will take the Federal Trade Commission a while to sort this one out.

Facebook had initially denied or at least did not confirm it, but eventually (apparently upon better advice from more level headed consultants) owned up to the dirty deed. It was supposed to be a whisper campaign that would point subscribers to a questionable new feature of their Google accounts, the “Social Circle” – a feature that supposedly mines the subscriber’s data base of contacts and sites visited that would be a violation of policies on subscriber privacy. The clumsy attempt overlooks the fact that it is an old feature, not a new one, so technically, it’s not news anymore, and the presentation was misleading and unduly alarming. In any case, the tactic that they employed was what killed them – they chose to engage a highly respected blogger named Christopher Soghoian, whose expertise is privacy and internet security, hoping he would cooperate by publishing under his name the black propaganda that they had ghost-written for him. And what did Mr. Soghoian do? He posted the exchange of emails between him and the PR company, exposing the attempt. Bang!

Big companies engaging PR agencies for black propaganda work is not new. In the local scene, this kind of activity is usually more visible during the election campaign season. And yes, sometimes it backfires. Or, doesn’t do any damage at all. Remember the issue of P.Noy’s supposed mental disorder? According to that story, a document from the Ateneo, signed by Fr. Carmelo Caluag, indicated that then presidential candidate Noynoy Aquino suffered from some kind of depression. The document was soon enough established as a fake, and no real damage was done, as Noynoy’s popularity was undiminished and he went on to win the elections by a wide margin. Exposing the ploy probably won him even more votes.

What prompted this? Google had earlier announced that they would like to go into the social arena, even dangling carrots like bonuses for employees if they succeed in getting into Facebook’s turf. It’s a declaration of war, or at least an invasion. It seems that Facebook believes that Google employees are happy enough with what they have. They don’t need more reasons to be any happier.

But their counter-invasion tactics will need to be reviewed. To quote Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, who excoriated Facebook for this failed attack:
“Secretly paying a PR firm to pitch bloggers on stories going after Google, even offering to help write those stories and then get them published elsewhere, is not just offensive, dishonest and cowardly. It’s also really, really dumb. I have no idea how the Facebook PR team thought that they’d avoid being caught doing this.”
Seriously now, what were they thinking?

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites