Online smear campaigns use social media to shape public opinion
By LAILA AZHAR — features@theaggie.org
Early into the press tour for “It Ends With Us” — a 2024 film based on Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel — fans were quick to point out tensions between the cast members.
Co-stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, who also directed the film, were rarely spotted with each other outside of filming. At the movie’s premiere, the two didn’t pose for a single photograph together. Lively and Hoover, alongside cast member Jenny Slate and Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, subsequently unfollowed Baldoni on Instagram.
On social media, a narrative quickly emerged, and Lively was widely criticized for her lighthearted tone in promotional interviews.
“Grab your friends, wear your florals and head out to see [the movie],” Lively said in a promotional video posted on Instagram.
Baldoni, on the other hand, spoke soberly about the realities of domestic violence, a theme the movie devotes much of its attention to.
A 2016 video of Lively responding to an interviewer’s question about her pregnancy resurfaced — titled “The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job.” Additionally, Lively promoted her beverage company and launched a hair-care company alongside her promotion of the film, as well as revealed her husband had written a scene and commissioned her own edit of the film, earning her a producer credit.
In the court of social media, Lively was found guilty of being abrasive and hard to work with, of being controlling and of skirting Baldoni’s authority over the movie and guilty of being callous toward the serious subject matter of the film, according to public opinion.
In December 2024, nearly five months after the movie’s release, The New York Times’ article, “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine,” revealed the behind-the-scenes details of the situation.
Lively had called a meeting with Baldoni and Jamey Heath, the film’s lead producer, in which she had made several complaints regarding inappropriate conduct on set, according to the article.
“She claimed Mr. Baldoni had improvised unwanted kissing and discussed his sex life,” the article reads. “Mr. Heath had shown her a video of his wife naked. […] She said that both men repeatedly entered her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding.”
Following these complaints, Lively then made requests requiring an intimacy coordinator to be on set during her and Baldoni’s scenes together to ensure her safety and comfort. In return, Baldoni, alongside public relations (PR) executives Melissa Nathan, Jessica Abel and Jed Wallace, orchestrated a media frenzy aimed at painting Lively in a negative light, according to the article.
For example, the report states that the official marketing strategy for the movie involved keeping an uplifting tone when discussing the film. When Lively received criticism for this approach, Baldoni and his PR team chose to display a more serious attitude, according to The New York Times article.
While the details of how the campaign operated are murky, communication between the PR executives contain references to “social manipulation” and “proactive fan posting,” according to the article.
“We’ve started to see shift on social, due largely to Jed and his team’s efforts to shift the narrative,” one of Nathan’s employees wrote in a group text.
A leaked voice note, however, shows Baldoni apologizing to Lively for his initial reaction to her version of a scene, praising her creative skills. Many believe this shows that Baldoni was not responsible for a hostile environment on set and was instead receptive and accommodating to her ideas.
His legal team additionally released a video of Baldoni and Lively on set together while filming a slow dance scene, claiming it refutes her allegations of harassment. Baldoni denies the allegations made by Lively, alleging that she collaborated with The New York Times to portray him in an unfavorable light. He has filed lawsuits against both Lively and The New York Times for defamation and libel, respectively. The trial is set for March 2026.
The public discourse over the PR campaign has brought attention to a similar situation of an actress’ abuse allegations being discredited. In 2016, Johnny Depp’s ex-wife Amber Heard filed for a restraining order claiming she had been physically and sexually abused.
“She’s begging for global humiliation,” Depp said via text message. “She’s gonna get it.”
In 2022, the Depp v. Heard defamation trial took the internet completely by storm. This case, however, wasn’t the first time these claims of physical abuse had been tried in court.
When an article published in The Sun referred to Depp as a “wife beater,” he filed a lawsuit against News Group Newspapers Limited in the High Court of Justice in London, claiming the piece was libelous. He lost the case, and in 2020, the judge ruled that 12 cases of alleged assault had been proven to a civil standard.
The 2022 case regarded an op-ed Heard published in The Washington Post in 2018 — an op-ed in which she did not specifically name Depp. Rather, Heard had stated that she had become “a public figure representing domestic abuse.”
The livestreamed trial sparked a barrage of online hate toward Heard. Social media users scrutinized every detail of her body language, mocked her testimony and criticized her every move.
As Depp was more famous than Heard, he had a natural advantage when it came to garnering the public’s sympathy. Additionally, he employed a crisis PR team (which included Melissa Nathan, who would later go on to represent Baldoni), and the conservative media outlet The Daily Wire, founded by Ben Shapiro, spent thousands of dollars promoting anti-Heard advertisements.
In a 2023 journal article, researchers analyzed the impact different forms of information diffusion on social media have on public discourse, comparing viral diffusion (when information is spread through a peer-to-peer network) and broadcast diffusion (when an external event serves as a catalyst for discourse across various internet communities).
Richard Huskey, a co-author of the paper and a professor in the UC Davis Department of Communication and the Cognitive Science program, commented on the broadcast-like nature of the Depp v. Heard trial’s coverage on social media.
“Even I heard about it,” Huskey said. “I’m not connected to those kinds of people on the internet at all — I am not following that kind of discourse, and somehow it even made its way into my conscious awareness.”
While topics like this one initially generate a lot of attention, eventually the internet moves on.
“When we’re looking at an event that will elicit a broadcast diffusion, there’s first not a lot of conversation and discussion, and then all of a sudden everybody’s talking about it all at once,” Huskey said. “The peak happens almost at the very beginning and then discussion kind of decays over time.”
However, despite their short lifespan online, the impact of these situations are far-reaching — as one student at UC Davis has observed, they reveal a culture of misogyny online.
“It shows how thinly veiled the hatred for powerful [and] beautiful women really is,” Ella Fodor, a second-year wildlife, fish and conservation biology major, said.
As Cuahtemoc Martinez Marquez, a second-year international relations and psychology double major, pointed out, these situations display the immense power of social media.
“Using the press to shift everyone’s opinion and cover your own faults is a gaslighting technique,” Marquez said. “This situation shows a very negative side to social media: its ability to ruin reputations.”
This sentiment echoes the ideas expressed in an open letter signed by more than 130 domestic violence organizations and experts: Powerful men, armed with public relations teams and media manipulation, have seemingly learned to weaponize the internet to tarnish the reputations of women who speak out, setting a dangerous precedent for victims everywhere.
On social media, it’s often easy to scroll mindlessly, passively absorbing online content without fully understanding the forces behind it. We can be flooded with posts, opinions, and content that generate conversation and have the potential to shape our thoughts, without even realizing how this discourse might be manipulated to serve a specific agenda.
The Depp v. Heard trial has largely faded from online discourse. In a few months, the Lively and Baldoni situation will likely follow suit, but the online culture that subjects victims of abuse to onslaughts of public ridicule will remain. The internet is not an inherently neutral space — it can be shaped by existing social structures and manipulated to meet the needs of powerful individuals.
Melissa Nathan — who worked on both Depp and Baldoni’s campaigns — encapsulated the underlying dynamics of these media strategies in a leaked text from The New York Times article.
“And the socials are really, really ramping up in his favour,” Nathan said. “She must be furious. It’s actually sad because it just shows you how people really want to hate on women.”
Written by: Laila Azhar — features@theaggie.org
