Did the Germans really bayonet Belgian babies? Public relations has been a strategic weapon for a long time, in which mere words and images can have catastrophic results. Away from the bullets, it has been refined by tobacco companies, political smearers and climate change denialists, and the same names and companies turn up in all these combat zones.
But the rise of social media has allowed Satans’ little helpers to call on the Beast itself, with the rise and rise of Dark PR. Lawyer and crisis management advisor Prash Naik, speaking at the 2018 Australian International Documentary Conference, described Dark PR in these bleak words: it is ‘a more sophisticated form of negative public relations which manipulates social media and is designed to distort, deceive, disrupt and discredit.’