Question: Do you respond to anonymous attacks?
Answer: Most likely, no. If the attacks gain legs later as news stories, then you can respond to the issue, but not the attacker.
The rationale: The knee-jerk response from communicators is to communicate. This is often a counter-productive approach to take. When facing an attack, especially an anonymous one, there are many dynamics at play.
First, anonymous attacks, commonplace as they are online, speak volumes in and of themselves about the attackers. Who are they? Why are they anonymous? If attacks in general hold little credibility (they do) – as opposed to reasoned and informed dialogue – anonymous attacks offer less to take seriously. Attacks in general come from those who have usually made up their mind about people and issues. They attack because they are waging a war of ideology. They are not attempting to actually work with those who they criticize or to try to understand complexities of issues and perspectives or to come to any sort of mutual understanding.
Second, it’s now confirmed that anonymous attack forums are part of the news business model, one that appears to be borne as a survival strategy. Whereas newspapers would once spend time verifying the identity of authors to letters to the editor, media now appear to gladly provide forums to the uninformed and bitter. As newsrooms continue to shrink and be eliminated, the “anything goes” approach to increasing news site visitation and repeat pageviews can now be spun to advertisers as the maintenance of a “vibrant community.”
Finally, given the above, there is little credibility found in online news forums (and, frankly, the news itself doesn’t hold much weight in court) and even less so among anonymous bloggers and Twitterers. While they can be entertaining and can serve a self-validating function for one’s own beliefs, bitterness and/or paranoia, at the end of the day it’s best not to feed into this cycle by simply not participating in it.
Second best would be to respond to issues on your own time and in your own domain. Any direct response to attacks only feeds an ever-hungry beast that news agencies seem desperate to continue to feed.
PR people should take the high road by not playing a role in this downward cycle of information dissemination – in most cases, by keeping their mouths shut.
Ike
1 year ago
Absolutely — under the vast majority of circumstances, those anonymous comment hives are toxic and to be avoided.
The only time I can think to wade into the ooze is when there is an outright lie that gains traction from the repetition. I’m not talking about the one-shot accusation that your company slaughters babies, but rather the baby-killer charges that continue from topic to topic and over a period of time.
In those cases, a simple statement linking to a company-operated site — posted by a transparent and identifiable media representative — can at least get you on the record as having opposed the tenor of the comments.
(and in certain circumstances, it’s nice to use your analytics tools to see who clicks over to read your response from that comment page… but that’s only because I am a sneaky webmaster…)
Melanie
1 year ago
STFU is a good policy for communications professionals. But toxic as those sites are, I kinda like them. It’s interesting to me to wade in a see what people are saying–especially since I know they are probably writing exactly what they are really thinking since they are hidden behind a veil of anonymity. It may be sickening, but it’s enlightening. If you are gathering info for a talking points piece, anonymous responses to your articles would be a good place to look in order to find points that will inevitably need to be refuted.
Incidentally, The WSJ and NY Times have these sites, and boy do they get entertaining.