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Transcript:
Today I have an update on one of those topics that I know you guys come to me expressly for. That’s right: Hollywood gossip. Remember to submit your anonymous tips about celebs to okay just kidding, this remains a channel focused on critical thinking but as long time viewers know, there’s one story of underhanded manipulative misinformation involving celebrities that just keeps coming back up: the public relations firm run by Melissa Nathan, famous for whipping up misogynistic outrage online against Amber Heard for their client Johnny Depp, against Blake Lively for their client Justin Baldoni, and most recently against Amanda Ghost for their client Rebel Wilson.
If you missed my previous videos on these cases, the quick summary is that wealth celebrities, including Jeffrey Epstein, have hired Nathan and her cohorts to engage in massive efforts to distract and manipulate public opinion online. They used bots to flood social media with millions of posts asserting that, for instance, Amber Heard lied about Johnny Depp’s physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of her and calling on brands to drop her. When Blake Lively accused Justin Baldoni of inappropriate conduct on their film, Nathan’s “digital army” convinced Redditors that Lively was the real predator, to the point that texts revealed even Nathan herself was shocked they could be so easily manipulated.
“It’s actually sad because it just shows you (how) people really want to hate on women,” Nathan texted a coworker.
Her work for Rebel Wilson was truly next level, as she apparently created websites that alleged Wilson’s target was actually involved in sex trafficking, labeling her the “Indian Ghislaine Maxwell,” an epithet that is especially ironic considering the fact that Melissa Nathan was, herself, Jeffrey Epstein’s publicist.
As a quick update to the defamation case against Wilson, it did go to trial a few months after my video, and Wilson “won” in that a judge dismissed the case. However, the reason she won is because the judge found everyone involved on both sides to be lying, and when it came to the websites claiming Amanda Ghost was an international sex trafficker, the judge found that it was all too silly to actually have caused damage to Ghost. “The ordinary reasonable reader would have scrolled through the post relatively quickly and his or her reaction would have been impressionistic and fleeting,” she said.
Which, sure, fair enough! Years ago, someone with a decent online platform accused me of saying something wildly bigoted at a bar. They even named the bar, which turned out to not actually exist. I went to a lawyer friend and asked if I should sue them. “Sure, it’s defamatory,” they said, “but is anyone actually going to believe that bullshit? Go live your life and trust that normal people will not give a shit.” And they were right! Eventually everyone realized that person was insane and I don’t think they actually have a platform anymore, and all I had to do was log off.
Anyway, the Rebel Wilson update isn’t the only reason I’m talking about Melissa Nathan, again. I stumbled upon a blog post recently that I found absolutely fascinating, and I wanted to share it with you.
It’s a blog called “Underneath the Feed,” and I want to state up front this red flag: there’s only one post as of this recording, and it’s written by “a research collective with a wide range of professional backgrounds, including data science, software engineering, law, journalism, and public policy. We expose social media manipulation that distorts the digital public square.” They say that they “have chosen to remain anonymous for multiple reasons, including the tenor of online discussions surrounding the (Blake) Lively case and the fact that this article is an odd fit for some of our public professional profiles.”
So, take this with a grain of salt: it is posted anonymously and it is not peer-reviewed. That said, I’ve gone through and verified as much as I could and I think they present compelling evidence for their case.
In my video about Melissa Nathan’s work for Justin Baldoni to degrade and delegitimize Blake Lively, I pointed to the treasure trove of texts and emails that were revealed during the legal proceedings, which made Nathan’s manipulation of social media obvious. This post reveals that there is actually much more that wasn’t revealed, either because Lively’s lawyers didn’t find it or didn’t feel it necessary to submit to the court.
The collection of researchers, who I will refer to as simply “The Feed,” created a really interesting method to identify Redditors who displayed inauthentic behavior: they built a tool that would find groups of users on large subreddits who also happened to share engagement with one another on unrelated, smaller, more niche subreddits. They found six accounts that shared activity in five different subreddits. Four of those subreddits focused on the Lively v. Baldoni case. The fifth was about The Fray. That’s a band that has nothing to do with Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, or SEEMINGLY anything else I’ve talked about thus far. Put a pin in that. We’ll come back to it.
The researchers found that these six accounts interacted constantly with one another, posting more than 443 posts and 7,701 comments just about Lively v. Baldoni. They often posted nearly identical posts within minutes or hours of one another, in Lively/Baldoni subreddits and also in on subreddits like r/dating_advice and r/relationships where they could build up “karma,” or a history of posts that tricks the algorithm into thinking they’re authentic users.
Further establishing that these accounts were run by the same person (or PR company), the researchers found that they were all created in the past five years, and they all post at around the same time of day.
Further establishing their inauthenticity, the researchers caught them changing from white to black avatars before beginning a campaign to criticize Lively for having a wedding on a plantation, “as a black woman.”
And yes, as I have stated repeatedly whenever I make videos on this topic, Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds probably suck in lots of ways, one of those being that they got married on a plantation. They apologized publicly and said they had regretted it and already held a private second ceremony elsewhere, but whatever. You can dislike them for that while still recognizing how misinformation AND true information is weaponized by powerful people to meet their ends. Personally, I think most rich and famous people are shitty and I think it’s ignorant to get married on a plantation without understanding the history, and I also think it’s wildly racist and misogynistic for a public relations firm to adopt the persona of a black woman to generate hatred against a woman for having the temerity to say that a man sexually harassed her.
Anyway, the researchers tracked the posts by these accounts and found them switching personalities and backgrounds as needed, whether they would get more traction as someone who was weighing in as an expert on what a bitch Blake Lively is or someone new to the whole ordeal who is “just asking questions” about what a bitch Blake Lively is.
The report goes into minute detail on what those accounts got up to, so if you’re interested I encourage you to go read the entire thing. After it was posted, the accounts were deleted and their posts wiped, but there are tools you can use to dig up an archive, like rosint.dev. Here’s the since-deleted history of u/firstwepour-roses, who was so successful at drumming up anti-Lively hatred that their posts on r/ItEndsWithLawsuits subreddit made it to YouTuber Kjersti Flaa, who broadcast the bot’s “findings” to nearly 300,000 subscribers. Only 100,000 of them saw it, but still, I imagine the PR firm considered that a great success.
The Lively vs. Baldoni case is pretty much finished now, so hopefully we’ll stop seeing these inauthentic accounts boosting bullshit and maybe some day I’ll stop having people post weird comments like this screed from someone who appears to be a full grown adult man claiming “The Judge in the case tore apart the claims and rightly so”, or this poor idiot who cries “Never have seen someone this confident when wrong
This aged badly she was never harrassed
Make a new video”
Okay, @theamazingpoof2205, I hope you enjoyed this one. Just to let you know, Lively’s case against Baldoni was settled out of court before going to trial, and Baldoni’s defamation case against Lively was dismissed and a judge ordered him to pay her nearly half a million dollars in attorney’s fees because it was so frivolous, but if it makes you feel better, she wanted way more than that so she lost something, too. Kind of.
I want to end by going back to The Fray. Remember The Fray? From either earlier in this video, or the 2000s? They had some hits back then, including “How to Save a Life,” which I just went and listened to and have absolutely no memory of, but apparently they were very popular! But at some point, the lead singer left, and in 2024 the band came back with a new EP in which their guitarist now took on lead vocals, and fans’ reaction was not particularly great. Following that relaunch, the six fake accounts that were working on making you hate Blake Lively started also trying to generate some buzz in r/TheFray, creating 256 posts and 1,107 comments in the otherwise quiet corner of Reddit.
They didn’t just post about how much they loved the new music, possibly because that would have been a bit too obvious. Instead, they got in fights with each other over whether or not the new vocalist was as good as the original guy, and begged other users to listen to the new stuff and weigh in. They shifted the overall tone of the subreddit from a quiet one where old fans would wax nostalgic about the glory days into an energetic place of debate where the focus was on the new era.
It’s quite clever, really, but apparently not clever enough. Unlike the Blake Lively haters, the fans on r/TheFray actually figured out what was happening: “I hate to say it,” posted one (real) fan, “but the cult mentality has genuinely left me wondering if Joe (the new singer) hired some PR group to infiltrate Reddit.If anything if these Joe fans would calm down,more Isaac fans might warm up a bit more to them,but they themselves are creating this divide.”
Impressively, the authentic Fray fans even identified which accounts were inauthentic, checked their posting history, and FIGURED OUT THAT THEY WERE ALSO brigading the Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni subreddits! As time went on, the real users just accepted the bots, using them as a direct line to chat with the band. When u/firstwepour-roses asked the subreddit what songs people were hoping to hear on the new tour, one user replies, “Since this is their PR team I NEED THEM to listen to me. I want them to perform Hundred and Trust Me. I don’t care if it’s good. Thank you. That’s all.”
Honestly, incredible stuff. I may not be a fan of The Fray, but I AM now a fan of The Fray’s fans. Not only were they savvy enough to know that someone was trying to manipulate them, but they learned how to turn it around and get what they wanted out of the planned manipulators.
So yeah, I think we can safely say that this is just more manipulation on the part of the fine folks at Melissa Nathan’s PR firm. On the bright side, her work on r/TheFray tells us that she doesn’t ONLY work for child sex traffickers, rapists, abusers, and serial liars. I guess she’s just better at the job when the client is evil.
