Environmental activist Greenpeace and “culture jamming” impersonator The Yes Lab in recent weeks concocted an ingenious, but vicious, campaign targeting the Shell oil company.
It all started with a spoof Web site, which appeared on the face of it to be a genuine Shell campaign declaring the company to be “Arctic Ready”. Among the false public relations guff on the site, the campaign appeared to crowdsource clever advertising slogans for images of the Arctic, oil drilling, or both. These quickly went viral, under the headline “Shell PR Fail”.
Alert visitors to the site would have noted that the nonchalant, cocky style of the copy does not match Shell's usual tone. The real Shell marketing department would never risk such a thing unless they were all drunk, adolescent, or both. Still, thousands of people were taken in.
The campaign was ratcheted up with a video of what appeared to be a Shell function at the Seattle Space Needle to send off the drilling rigs Kulluk and Noble Discoverer. A model of the Kulluk, which supposedly functioned as a drinks fountain, malfunctioned, spilling dark liquid over guests of honour.
It was clever and funny, and it quickly went viral, closing in on a million views at the time of writing. Pity it was all fake. It was a publicity stunt, designed, rehearsed and directed by Greenpeace and its anti-corporate Yes Men comrades.
In addition to the fake @ ArcticReady Twitter profile, a new Twitter account emerged, under the name @ ShellisPrepared. Claiming to be the social media team of Shell, based in The Hague, Netherlands, the account demanded that people stop forwarding “offensive ads”, or “things will get legal real fast”.
That such a colloquial Americanism is unlikely to come from a Dutch company, or indeed any company's legal or marketing departments, didn't prevent many more people being deceived. Not even the most outrageous statements gave the game away - statements such as “#Shell agrees, oil spills are horrible. But collateral damage is expected. The end justifies the means.” And better yet: “PLEASE DO NOT RETWEET ANY OF OUR TWEETS. They are intended for their @ recipients only!”
The Web is full of gullible people, many of whom support Greenpeace. And Greenpeace set out to gull them all. However, as amusing as this campaign might be, it raises a number of serious questions.
At a political level, one has to question whether or not Greenpeace is capable of engaging with facts when it has to fake the behaviour of companies it claims to oppose. It does not merely exaggerate to spin a story - as its oil-company targets do - but routinely engages in unlawful conduct, which now includes actively deceiving its supporters by impersonating its victims in order to smear them. Why anyone takes such unethical activism seriously is a mystery. (Paul Root Wolpe goes into the ethical questions for CNN.)
At a legal level, a few red flags are waving, too. The Twitter accounts remain active, although they clearly violate Twitter's impersonation policy. The accounts have been reported repeatedly, and Twitter routinely suspends other impersonation accounts that are not easily identifiable as parody or commentary.
Why anyone takes such unethical activism seriously is a mystery.
Ivo Vegter, contributor, ITWeb
Granted, trying to censor the Web is an exercise in futility, but impersonation with intent to defame or fraudulently obtain a benefit violates laws in several countries and US states, too. California, under which Twitter's use is governed, even has a separate law that prohibits online impersonation and enables victims to sue for compensation. Kashmir Hill examines the murky legal issues for Forbes.
At a media level, it raises questions about the gullibility of news outlets when faced with hoaxes. Such stories are often too good to check, especially when they involve causes to which editors are sympathetic. Several major publications fell for it. Ironically, they may have derived more value from the traffic than it cost them in credibility. They then earned themselves some more traffic by closing the stable door after the horse had bolted, blithely reporting on the clever hoax for which they had fallen.
Good journalistic practice would have mitigated the harm the news media did to the victim of the hoax, which arguably makes the media complicit in Greenpeace's unethical activism. It is unclear how it benefits the media to reinforce the dictum that one ought never to believe what one reads in the newspapers. For a good analysis of how the media was manipulated, read Ryan Holiday on Forbes.
Finally, at a marketing level, it will give companies pause. This event will reconfirm the prejudices of those who fear the public vulnerability of social media, and make companies less transparent and responsive to customers and the concerned public. This is contrary to the stated goals of environmental campaigners, and also sacrifices the opportunity for companies to engage more closely with the buying public.
It is tough enough to deal publicly with honest complaints and deal intelligently with vindictive gripes. Now, social media engagement presents the added danger of exposing oneself to commercial or political adversaries who harness the technology only to impersonate targets with the intent to tarnish their name. This is a scary risk to mitigate and manage.
In this case, Shell has every reason to be outraged. It presumably tries hard to keep a clean sheet, if only because the legal and marketing consequences of mistakes are high. It is also well aware that some people think it doesn't try hard enough. However, malicious misrepresentation designed to defame crosses both an ethical and legal line, whichever way you look at it.
The irony is that contrary to the caricature Greenpeace sketches of Shell as an arrogant, litigious behemoth that is inept at social media and PR, the company's only response has been a factual statement dissociating itself from the activism campaigns. It has not courted the Streisand effect by instituting legal action, although it has ample grounds for doing so.
Greenpeace will chalk this up as a successful campaign, which raised awareness and was a lot of fun to pull off. That it was.
More serious-minded observers, however, will note that it insulted its own supporters and undermined its own cause with its dishonesty and blatant intent to deceive. By contrast, Shell's response has been the very antithesis of “PR fail”. It has been professional, restrained, honest and mature.
Who looks more trustworthy now?
Related column:
Epic fail. But whose?
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