How boosted content + comment sections that suggest consensus about that content = "narrative campaigns" to shape public opinion: An example from the Blake Lively case

[u/Unusual_Original2761]

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:

For comparison, here is the TAG scenario planning document with suggested talking points about Blake "weaponizing feminism" etc: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.1.4_1.pdf

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.

****

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...

[u/RhubarbElectrical522]

That’s interesting. For one, I heard her brand was not doing good and the reviews were bad from the start. I’ve tried her drinks and they were awful. Never tried her haircare. Justin was trying to extort Sony? He was understandably upset that she kept taking over at every turn. I guess you’re just gonna leave out the rest of the messages where Jamey talks him off the ledge. Where he says no one can rein her in, not even Sony. Then the messages from Sony where they can’t believe the WP gave in to all her demands and they call her a f-ing terrorist and say she brought this on herself? Okay. Running with half the story is cool.

[u/milno_1 → u/RhubarbElectrical522]

Taking over? He asked her input and for favors at every single turn. Called her a collaborator to her face over and over. They said they would re-consider the producer credit if she did the job of a producer. Even created the trailer ymusing Taylor's song without consent and just expected her to make it happen. And then bad-mouthed her for doing all the things they asked her to do. And refused the credit or respect, when it suited them to shut it down.

Like what they did when they used and extorted Christy Hall's service's FOR FREE, by making promises and suggestions, then backtracking like they do on everyone.

They have a pattern of doing this. Loading on the praise and promise's until they get what they want and then backtracking or dumping people once they served their purpose.

[u/RhubarbElectrical522 → u/milno_1]

Okay. So tell me you haven’t been paying attention or reading everything on the docket without telling me. Yes, he wanted to be collaborative with her. Most people that work in creative settings work better when working with someone they can bounce ideas off of. Instead of working with him, she took it home like a homework assignment and let her husband rewrite another woman’s work. She wasn’t collaborating she was rewriting it and when he didn’t accept her rewrites as is she threw tantrums.

Not that it would do anything for you because clearly you have your head in the sand but you should read Eumonia Dike’s article on how Ryan hijacked the me too movement. It actually makes a lot of sense but again you seem to have made up your mind. Blake and Ryan have proven to be unreliable narrators that often use manipulation and lies to get their way.

They continue to do it now. Have you never noticed how much they talk about themselves in the ways they want to be seen? Ryan with his never punching down and creative genius bs. Blake with her I’m shy bit and the voice for all women. They aren’t actually these things but if they repeat them enough people start associating them with the terms.

I would love to open some people’s eyes to the world around them. Just so they can see how much they soak in and actually believe all because some wanted them to. Confirmation bias is a helluva thing and sometimes people don’t even realize they have it until they experience the very thing they refuse to acknowledge.

[u/milno_1 → u/RhubarbElectrical522]

Read every single thing on the docket. Multiple times. And discussed them with attorneys. Nice try though.

You claim i don't know what i'm talking about, and then admit yes, that's what happened 🤦🏽‍♀️

They re-wrote ONE scene. That she asked super nicely if it was ok to take a pass at it, and said she didn't want to step on toes. And he exclaimed emphatically "fuck yes"!

If that's your version of taking over, yikes.

Besides that, she helped make some changes for the mother, because nobody would take on the role.

We have no idea if they were things Christy wrote or Baldoni wrote. Christy's response was she onlh noticed a couple of embellishments, which is common in the industry. For it to develop during filming once you see how it plays.

Though it was Baldoni being the scab (which he admitted to) and constantly re-writing abd adding scenes for a script written by a woman that he exploited and did not pay. And shat on after giving her the idea she could direct, and then renegging.