Buzzfeed News recently ran a story about reputation management companies using fake online personas to help their clients cover up convictions for fraud. These firms buy up domains and create personal websites for a crowd of fake professionals (stock photo headshots and all) who share the same name as the client. The idea is that search results for the client’s name will return these websites instead, hiding any news about white collar crime.

This is a fascinating response to a big trend in criminal justice where private companies are hosting mugshots, criminal histories, and other personal information online. Sociologist Sarah Lageson studies these sites, and her research shows that these databases are often unregulated, inaccurate, and hard to correct. The result is more inequality as people struggle to fix their digital history and often have to pay private firms to clean up these records. This makes it harder to get a job, or even just to move into a new neighborhood.
The Buzzfeed story shows how this pattern flips for wealthy clients, whose money goes toward making information about their past difficult to find and difficult to trust. Beyond the criminal justice world, this is an important point about the sociology of deception and “fake news.” The goal is not necessarily to fool people with outright deception, but to create just enough uncertainty so that it isn’t worth the effort to figure out whether the information you have is correct. The time and money that come with social class make it easier to navigate uncertainty, and we need to talk about how those class inequalities can also create a motive to keep things complicated in public policy, the legal system, and other large bureaucracies.
Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow him on Twitter.
Comments 10
Rita — July 18, 2019
This is 100% right and I can't believe how succinctly you stated it. This is a great primer on "Rep Management" and a reminder that believers in real justice are going to have to find a way to do these same things, but not charge $$$. I contracted for one of those firms, and our "clients" were a Who's Who of who's in legal trouble now. And they treated us, their "content farms," badly. Woe to they who had only one job as a Rep mgmt content developer. Google keeps adding new patches to fight this sort of thing, to moderate effect.
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Tannalele — November 27, 2019
Good article https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2019/11/
Tannalele — November 27, 2019
And very useful
George Paul — October 13, 2020
Reading the story given at the Buzzfeed News feed regarding the reputation management companies and their online scams has frightened me. We should properly investigate a firm before hiring it. You rightly said that we should read about those things which we attend to have in the future just as my girlfriend read about real life casino check her explanation about it, she also read about how to win real life casino easily.
Anonymous — January 28, 2021
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