The Public Diplomacy Collaborative

"The firm’s failure underscores the broader pressures roiling the public relations industry in a whipsaw online world, where fake news, Twitterbots, gaming Google searches and revising Wikipedia pages are valuable tools for helping to shape narratives and recast reputations.

"Bell Pottinger’s collapse also highlights the eagerness of politicians, celebrities, companies and governments around the world to hire communications firms that will sometimes go to extreme lengths to influence opinion and media coverage, or to ignite activism through social networks."

Bell Pottinger, British P.R. Firm for Questionable Clients, Collapses The firm’s financial failure was hastened by a race-baiting campaign it undertook in South Africa that spiraled into a disaster.

From the New York Times:

"In China, where the government often highlights social tensions in the United States as a way of undermining democratic ideals, state-run news outlets prominently featured the violence in Charlottesville...
“'The world’s superpower is increasingly mired in chaos,' said an opinion piece in Global Times, a state-run publication that specializes in scathing critiques of the West. 'The source of global instability may not be North Korea’s nuclear ambitions nor Europe’s refugee crisis, but the chaos in the U.S.'

"The article added: 'The power struggle in the 21st century is not entirely about technology, the military or economy. Social stability carries more weight.'”

Angela Merkel Condemns Charlottesville Violence as ‘Racist’ and ‘Evil’ Several world leaders spoke out against the deadly episode, while others tried to exploit it to advance their own agendas.

"Quite apart from the adorable Canadian naiveté involved in passive-aggressively permitting the Kremlin to headline-hack itself out of a national spotlight that should have been shining last week on Putin’s belligerence in Ukraine and the Baltics, there are a couple of things that distinguish this particular Kremlin caper from the run-of-the-mill jobs.

"The first is that it’s a textbook case of Russian disinformation by conspiracy theory. The second is that this time around, the Russians were caught red-handed.

"Unfortunately, we’ve all spent a great deal of effort being clever in our elucidations upon how to properly distinguish between a Ukrainian patriot and a N**i collaborator in the terror time of the 1940s, and about where one might situate the boundaries of Soviet-occupied Eastern Galicia on contemporary maps of the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, and other such boring ephemera.

"This is what Moscow wanted, and it also wanted the not-especially-bright among us to be wondering out loud and often about whether it might be true that Freeland is a Russophobic N**i sympathizer who can’t be trusted with the Foreign Affairs portfolio."

How Russia's attack on Freeland got traction in Canada - Macleans.ca Terry Glavin traces Moscow's "N**i-grandfather" calumny through a maze of cranks, propagandists and Putin fanciers—to Canada's mainstream media