Public relations has always had its shadow practices. What’s changed is not their existence, but their scale, speed and sophistication. In today’s attention economy, a subset of communications tactics – often referred to quietly as “Dark PR” – has moved from the margins to the mainstream.
These approaches reject transparency in favour of saturation. They do not seek to persuade so much as to overwhelm. Their aim is not belief, but disruption: to flood the information environment until scrutiny becomes impossible and fatigue sets in.
The question is no longer whether these tactics are ethical. The industry largely agrees they are not. The more uncomfortable question is whether they work.
How Dark PR functions
These campaigns aren’t about clever messaging. Rather, they typically rely on unattributed smear stories, manufactured outrage, coordinated disinformation and the algorithmic amplification of emotionally charged content through bots or paid networks.
These campaigns do not require credibility. They require volume. By blurring the line between fact, opinion and fabrication, they erode the conditions under which audiences can evaluate claims at all. The result is not consensus, but paralysis.
In that environment, attention – not truth – becomes the decisive variable.
The evidence of effectiveness
By conventional measures, Dark PR has delivered results.
In 2011, Burson–Marsteller planted privacy–focused critiques of Google on behalf of Facebook, briefly reframing media coverage at a critical moment. The campaign was later exposed, damaging the agency’s reputation – but the short–term objective had already been met.
More recent cases show even fewer consequences. A backlash against Bud Light following its partnership with transwoman Dylan Mulvaney escalated with a speed and coordination that researchers flagged as consistent with artificial amplification. Regardless of attribution, the outcome was clear: sales declined, distributors pulled back, and the brand retreated from public–facing messaging.
During the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard defamation trial, online sentiment shifted rapidly and decisively in Depp’s favour. Subsequent reporting, including the podcast Who Trolled Amber?, identified coordinated bot activity amplifying pro–Depp narratives and attacking Heard. The exposure did little to alter the reputational outcome.
A similar pattern has emerged in the dispute involving actor and director Justin Baldoni. In legal filings connected to the film It Ends With Us, Blake Lively alleges that Baldoni and his representatives orchestrated an online smear campaign against her. Despite multiple public accusations of misconduct, emotionally charged defences of Baldoni continue to dominate social platforms. The PR firm The Agency Group that were said to be involved previously represented Depp, reinforcing the sense of a repeatable model.
The same agency’s continued promotion of Travis Scott following the Astroworld tragedy illustrates the broader point: Dark PR can preserve cultural and commercial momentum without resolving the underlying harm.
If winning is defined as narrative control during moments of vulnerability, Dark PR works.
The myth of exposure
The industry often reassures itself that such tactics are self-defeating, and that manipulation inevitably leaves traces, and that exposure restores the truth.
In practice, exposure rarely produces reversal.
Bots may be identified, campaigns traced and tactics dissected, but public opinion seldom resets. Algorithmic amplification does not unwind. Audiences who disengage under information overload rarely return to re-evaluate the evidence. The informational damage is done.
Exposure may satisfy an ethical ledger. It does not reliably change outcomes.
The real cost
Where Dark PR imposes a cost is not in collapse, but in constraint.
Once an organisation or individual is associated with manipulation, every future communication is met with scepticism. Influence becomes narrower, louder and more polarised. Trust does not disappear; it fragments. Credibility becomes conditional and increasingly expensive to maintain.
For actors who only need to mobilise a loyal base, this trade-off can be acceptable. For brands, institutions and organisations that depend on broad legitimacy – regulators, partners, employees and diverse markets – it is corrosive.
Dark PR trades legitimacy for leverage. It allows actors to dominate moments, but reduces their ability to navigate systems, recover from future crises or ask for public grace.
Inside the machine
The effects are internal as well. Teams that normalise manipulation tend to optimise for volume over understanding and control over resolution. Success is measured by suppression and reach, not by insight or trust.
This does not lead to immediate dysfunction. It leads to strategic narrowing. Organisations become highly skilled at information combat and increasingly poor at addressing problems that cannot be drowned out.
So, does it win?
Dark PR can win battles. It can win many of them in succession. It is effective at delaying accountability, reshaping attention and protecting power in moments of threat.
What it struggles to do is build anything durable.
Each tactical success consumes trust, legitimacy and flexibility – resources that are difficult to replenish once spent. Over time, the range of viable futures contracts.
Dark PR does not fail because it is ineffective. It fails because it is extractive.
And extraction, however efficient, is not a strategy for endurance.
