Let's say you're a touring entertainer. You need to publicise your new show. You've arranged press conferences, you've commissioned posters, you've spent millions taking out ads in every newspaper and on every TV station in the land and you've crafted a bullet-proof content marketing and social media strategy. All that's left is to craft a couple of forged tweets. At least, that's what enigmatic TV illusionist Derren Brown did.
On 10th April, 2013 Brown took marketing of his latest show, 'Infamous', into his own hands with these two tweets:
It's important to note that Justin Bieber didn't tweet the original message and quite possibly has no idea who Derren Brown is, or what his latest show is all about. Brown fabricated the tweet, and retweeted it with his response to the faux-request for free tickets: "No." Cue 5,584 hysterical retweets in a matter of hours, broadcasting the tweet to all parts of the Twittersphere, most of them applauding Brown for his witty and cutting retort. That's effective (and cheap) marketing.
On the one hand, it's creative genius - perhaps we should have expected nothing less from a man who derives his fame from his ability to manipulate and influence others. It would have been all too easy to brazenly plug his 'Infamous' show to his 1.5 million followers, and decidedly less shareable. On the other hand, creative brilliance at the expense of another's reputation seems unethical: Brown was able to stage an online conversation, tweet it as though it were genuine, and profit from the ensuing furore.
So does Brown have a case to answer? Is it acceptable for someone to intentionally mislead their followers by forging a tweet and attributing another's name to it? Does directly profiting from such an act make it worse? When does Brown become guilty of not just a light-hearted jape, but libel?
In 2012, 1,000 tweeters erroneously implicated Lord McAlpine as the child molesting Tory the BBC refused to name. Those with 500 or fewer followers were absolved with a donation to charity, while the rest faced legal action for the damage they caused to McAlpine's reputation. I'm not suggesting Brown's actions are as consequential to Justin Bieber as a public Twitter outing was to Lord McAlpine, but the principle is the same and it's very hard to draw a line. Libel claims are usually reserved for vast, centralised institutions with broad reach, The McAlpine case was novel in its prosecution of large numbers of individuals whom, combined, had vast reach. Brown falls somewhere in the middle of these categories and thus it is hard to compare the amount of influence he has versus, say, a newspaper, or 10,000 individuals with meagre social followings. And that's assuming he's done something wrong in the first place.
Taken from the Masson vs. New Yorker Report, The Supreme Court define the consequences of libel as:
"A fabricated quotation may injure reputation in at least two senses, either giving rise to a conceivable claim of defamation. First, the quotation might injure because it attributes an untrue factual assertion to the speaker. An example would be a fabricated quotation of a public official admitting he had been convicted of a serious crime when in fact he had not."
"Second, regardless of the truth or falsity of the factual matters asserted within the quoted statement, the attribution may result in injury to reputation because the manner of expression or even the fact that the statement was made indicates a negative personal trait or an attitude the speaker does not hold."
Much of this definition is applicable to the Brown/Bieber case, but it's not clear-cut. Libel and defamation are, by definition, subjective - how do you accurately quantify the damage sustained to reputation? Social media muddies the water further (just asked the countless companies that try to come up with a metric to measure online influence - they can't). It's likely that there are millions of cases of Twitter users guilty of the same 'crime' as Brown, but their minuscule social influence has such little resonance that nobody makes a fuss. So is it fair that Brown should be held to account, just because he's popular?
Brown is guilty of making Justin Bieber look a bit silly, and taking advantage of Bieber's strained relationship with the UK public, following a string of controversial incidents. But is the initial tweet, sent to 1.5 million followers and retweeted by thousands of others to an even wider audience, truly damaging to Bieber's reputation? Unlikely. An irresponsible act, maybe, but a criminal act? I think not.
Where do you stand on this? When does the misrepresentation of another for personal gain via Twitter become unacceptable? I'd love to hear your thoughts.