Recently, leaked documents obtained by Forbidden Stories revealed the inner world of Eliminalia, a Spanish reputation management company. Forbidden Stories and partners investigated the company’s manipulation tactics to remove public-interest information from the internet.
Interfor International, the investigative firm helmed by our Advisory Board member Don Aviv, blogged about Forbidden Stories’ findings. The excerpts below raise awareness of the dirty tactics used by some reputation management agencies, and why it may pay to steer clear of them. That’s especially true if they promise to remove online content, a challenge we have written about here (and here).
Weaponizing Data Protection Regulations
Those who have studied Eliminalia’s strategy identified a pattern. When an article that included unpleasant truths about one of their clients appeared, the company began by sending takedown requests to the journalist, usually through a team member employing a false persona. If the journalist refused to remove their article, Eliminalia went after hosting providers, often weaponizing data protection laws such as the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), which was created in 2002 to protect copyrighted content, and the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), an EU privacy and human rights law, to push the provider to take down the material.
To exploit the DMCA, for example, they would copy an article, publish it on a third-party website with a falsified earlier date than the original and then claim the real article infringed on the law. Contesting a false claim of DMCA is not easy, leading to long and expensive legal battles many journalists are unable to afford.
Investigators found that if these methods did not work, Eliminalia would then try to hide the material through “deindexing,” which attempts to fool Google into hiding search terms from web results.
Throwing ‘Digital Atomic Bombs’
Eliminalia has used the strategy of “open redirects,” links that appear to drive traffic to legitimate websites but redirect to other fake sites.
At least 622 such websites have been identified. To make the sites appear legitimate, the company mixes content from real sources with positive information about individuals with the same names as their clients.
This method seems to have been successful at influencing Google’s search results, effectively making articles that include allegations against the company’s clients disappear, while replacing them with positive spin.
Now, Eliminalia and their clients are in the news, and many of their “removed” links and content are back on Google.
Eliminalia is far from the first reputation management firm to create fake news sites to post fake content on. That has been done from the onset of this industry, along with a myriad of ways to post links in places where unwitting internet users would click on, thinking they were clicking on something else.
The problem with using reputation management providers who game the system using what are known as “black hat” methods is that their handiwork is often discovered and undone by Google. You also risk the chance of being identified as a client in investigative articles about them (check out the 2020 Wall Street Journal article, Google Hides News, Tricked by Fake Claims.)
For more insights, read The Washington Post’s article, Leaked files reveal reputation-management firm’s deceptive tactics. And our ultimate guide, The Essentials: Online Reputation Management FAQs.
