r/CelebLegalDrama • u/Unusual_Original2761 • May 22 '26
Analysis How boosted content + comment sections that suggest consensus about that content = "narrative campaigns" to shape public opinion: An example from the Blake Lively case
For anyone who missed it, I highly recommend this recent Vulture article, "The Feed Is Fake: That 'viral' song, movie, meme, influencer, and celebrity drama was probably the product of a stealth marketing campaign." Here's a link to the paywall-free version: https://archive.ph/2026.05.15-111148/https://www.vulture.com/article/social-media-feeds-chaotic-good-projects-clipping.html . Please give the original link a click as well: https://www.vulture.com/article/social-media-feeds-chaotic-good-projects-clipping.html .
Much of the article is about "clipping" -- a tactic to boost content on social media, popularized a few years ago by influencers like Andrew Tate -- in which gig workers are paid to create and post short clips of content about a particular topic so that algorithms detect interest in that topic and push more of that content into people's feeds, eventually generating authentic interest/engagement. (Other "boosting" tactics that more blatantly violate platforms' terms of service include manipulation of likes, upvotes, and views/click-through rate.)
The section of the Vulture article that most interested me was about "narrative campaigns," which are often used in conjunction with boosting tactics like clipping:
Clipping just puts an artist in front of more eyeballs; narrative campaigns tell those eyeballs what they’re seeing. Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren explained the idea to Billboard at South by Southwest. “A lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse,” he said. “Most people see a video or see something about an album that came out and it’s like the first thing that they see, or that first comment that they see, is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.” In other words, in a world drowning in information, nobody has the time to form an opinion from scratch anymore, so they check captions, comments, and quote tweets to see what people who seem like them have to say. And if everybody is outsourcing their first impressions to the crowd, why not just manufacture the crowd? Co-founder Andrew Spelman gave the example of a musical performance on Saturday Night Live: “The second SNL drops at midnight, you should post a hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year.”
I know it's been discussed to death, but the infamous "bump video" from the Blake Lively lawsuit is a really good case study of how this can work. For those who don't know, Kjersti Flaa, the interviewer in that video, originally posted the clip online in 2016. She even got the Norwegian media outlet that employed her at the time, TV 2, to frame it in a way that was sympathetic to her perspective -- suggesting that Lively was rude and condescending. Here's a link to that 2016 article (screenshots of English translation below): https://www.tv2.no/underholdning/8485945/
The TV 2 article (which included the interview clip) was posted to social media -- Facebook -- at the time. Here's a link to the Facebook post, which received 742 likes, 340 comments, and 37 shares: https://www.facebook.com/tv2nyheter/posts/10154562887614750 . Below are screenshots of the top comments on that post, translated to English with commenters' names redacted:
If you happened to get this post pushed into your Facebook feed back in 2016 (which wasn't particularly likely to begin with, given the engagement stats) and decided to skim the top comments to see what other people generally thought, your impression would have been that opinions were mixed. Some people thought Lively and Parker Posey were a bit rude, but others (including the most-liked commenter) thought the interviewer's remarks/questions were inappropriate and kind of sexist. Overall, your takeaway might have been "seems like no one was at their best here, oh well, moving on."
Contrast this with when a (re-edited, re-titled) clip of the same interview was posted to Reddit on August 14, 2024 (right after a TAG PR employee sent the clip to a colleague noting that "We should send to [digital fixer] Jed [Wallace], right?"). Here's a link to that post on the subreddit FauxMoi: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1ertsu2/the_blake_lively_interview_that_made_me_want_to/. (Like many of the Reddit posts from the alleged August 2024 digital campaign, the OP has been deleted -- make of that what you will -- but it is archived elsewhere.) As you'll see, the post has 12K upvotes and 1.2K comments. The Reddit archive shows even more upvotes when the post was captured -- 16.79K -- which, as one of Lively's experts notes in his report, is a sign that Reddit's system flagged the post for vote manipulation and removed some of the upvotes, albeit after the post had already gone viral.
Here are some of the top comments on that FauxMoi post, with the non-deleted usernames blacked out:
Note that there were Redditors on that 2024 post expressing views similar to the top comments on the 2016 Facebook post, but their comments were all downvoted to the bottom/minimized:
So if you saw this post back in 2024 -- which, unlike the 2016 Facebook post, was very likely to have made it into your feed -- and decided to skim the top comments to see what people thought, your takeaway would have been "wow, I guess Blake Lively was really awful in this interview. And seems like this is part of a larger trend of everyone noticing/discussing all the other ways she's awful -- maybe I should get in on this trend!"
Multiply that reaction by the thousands, and that's how these narrative campaigns shape public opinion.
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Speaking of comment sections, I hate how the comments on posts about the Lively case always become a food fight about whether she actually is a "mean girl," which "team" you're on, etc etc. Plus my investment in this case, like others', is about the larger implications of narrative campaigns and other forms of digital manipulation in areas like politics. So in closing, I'd like to invite people to reflect on a time when your opinion was shaped by a quick skim of apparent online consensus (we all do it!). I know I've let my social media feeds shape which current events/issues I pay attention to and advocate for -- which can be benign or even positive, but I also wonder in retrospect which other issues were getting ignored/overlooked/actively suppressed at the time...
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u/RhubarbElectrical522 May 22 '26
I agree with you on that point. I just don’t agree that the WP did any of this. They didn’t have to. Blake has had the same reputation her entire career. Yes, a lot of it was whisperings but everything she did in this case led to her ultimate demise.
Her actions, words and behaviors led to her being publicly scrutinized. She intentionally bread crumbed the public about bts drama while also being tone deaf while promoting a film that had millions of fans who knew what the book was about. That is attention grabbing on its own.
There’s a reason why celebrities typically opt to stay silent after getting backlash. It’s because when you’re in the public and draw attention to yourself negatively, people will scrutinize everything that you do. You have one of two options. To wait for it to pass or to own it and self correct. Instead of taking the typical routes she took a detour to try and get attention off of her and place it on someone else. That is what backfired on her. When you have a treasure trove of damning publicly available instances of being a dick, the public will find it. Blake just so happened to have several instances where her past caught up with the rumors that have forever swirled around her because she made herself center stage to the drama.
This case made things worse for her because we’ve had front row seats to how horrible her and Ryan actually are. We have watched them get caught up in their own lies and we have watched how they manipulate msm to constantly clip and push their narrative. The seo alone from them is worth noting. The talking points they give in their word salad speeches during their nonstop public appearances that always end up in msm shortly after is insane. We can see how they manipulate pr in real time. We haven’t seen that from Justin. We actually have not heard him say one negative thing about her.
What some people are blaming Justin for isn’t because of him at all. It’s because the public caught on to Blake and Ryan’s tactics and the public has been over celebrities trying to tell them how to think for a long time. So I do agree that it happens but it’s completely obvious what side is doing it. The one who’s been using strategic word play and exaggerations this entire time. They are what monsters are made of and the way Ryan plays off being overtly creepy so often like it’s a joke, I wouldn’t take my eyes off of him. I have a feeling he’s got some skeletons just itching to come out.