The Mystery of My Strangely Viral Blake Lively Post Seems to Have Been Solved

One of my posts may have been artificially boosted as part of a smear campaign. A story about "crisis PR," fake numbers, fake jobs, and the consultant class.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since I started FilmDrunk in 2007. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

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(Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Sony Pictures)

Back in August, I wrote a fairly straightforward, run-of-the-mill post with a round-up of some of that week’s news: Blake Lively’s new movie It Ends With Us doing well at the box office, a mini-review of Longlegs, and a brief recap of David Zaslav being the corporate stooge you love to hate. It was the sort of melánge-of-stuff post I do from time to time: a way to share a few thoughts that maybe weren’t worth an entire post in their own right.

It wasn’t the kind of post that normally escapes the bounds of my normal readership, and I certainly didn’t expect it to. And yet, as the day wore on, I started to notice that this post was quickly climbing the ranks of my all-time most-viewed posts.

Generally speaking, I’d much prefer a particularly well-written essay or a review to get the big view numbers — something I’d thought deeply about and sweated over, shared by people who connected with it. Those are the kinds of things that feel the most validating for a writer/postkateer. And from a branding standpoint, you always want the posts you care about the most to be the most widely seen — simply as the best and hopefully most accurate representation of what you do.

But I’ve also been in this game long enough to know that you can’t always choose or predict what goes viral. Back in the early FilmDrunk days, posts about Gordon Ramsay’s dwarf porn double dying in a badger den or the woman with two vaginas getting offered a million dollars to do porn (two real viral stories from those days) always did exponentially better than anything smart or interesting I’d written. I could write the world’s cleverest article and it’s never going to be more interesting than a woman with two vaginas. That’s just basic human nature. But at least in those days, internet traffic still felt like a reasonably accurate measurement of actual human behavior. Rubbernecking a train wreck is an impulse as old as time (or at least, as old as trains).

Nowadays when a post does abnormally good traffic, you generally just figure you won the Google lottery. Such was the case with one of my other highly-viewed posts, about an eliminated Top Chef contestant not appearing on Last Chance Kitchen. 67% of that post’s views (according to Substack’s analytics) came from Google. That’s normal.

And yet, the Blake Lively post was doing even better traffic than the Top Chef one, despite, per Substack’s analytics, 99% of is traffic coming via email. That a post was getting many more times visitors than I have subscribers, despite not being shared outside of those subscriber emails, wouldn’t seem to make any sense.

I took a closer look at those email numbers. They revealed that the vast majority of the traffic was coming from one single email address — ben_houdaifa@yahoo.com. This email address isn’t connected to anyone I know, so far as I can tell, and the only Google result I found for it was a Spam report which seems to be related to phishing.

Between August 13th, when the post was written, and September 15th, This one subscriber had opened the same email almost 60,000 times, from 194 different devices. On August 15th, it was opened 2,058 times. On August 16th, 951 times. On August 17th, 641 times. And so forth. (These were painstaking numbers to collect, since they show up 10 at a time, and I would have to manually scroll to get them to keep populating — just the August 15 numbers felt like they took an entire morning, 200 manual scrolls. I never got to the bottom of the August 14th numbers, it’s more than four thousand).

Curious! I asked around about it. Mostly just a couple of other Substack writers and tech reporters, who also hadn’t seen anything like that before either. But who knows, maybe it was a bug or an anomaly.

I sort of shrugged and went on with my day. Other than the post appearing in my most-popular section for dubious reasons, the inflated numbers didn’t really affect me one way or another. All those views had led to only two paid subscriptions, which is a slightly below average for a review post (since it had a short review of Longlegs in it) and above average for a news round-up post. The view numbers seemed to have no effect on actual subscriptions at all. Mostly I forgot about it.

Fast-forward to this past week, when the New York Times dropped a meticulously reported exposé about the director of It Ends With Us, Justin Baldoni, who allegedly employed a “crisis management expert” and the publicist for his production company to conduct a wide-ranging negative influence campaign against his co-star in the film, Blake Lively. ‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine, read the headline, With the subhed, Private messages detail an alleged campaign to tarnish Blake Lively after she accused Justin Baldoni of misconduct on the set of “It Ends With Us.”

Baldoni and his team did all this, alleges the article, in order to discredit Lively after she had made various allegations against him and the production of the film ended in acrimony.

The whole thing had started (again, according to the article) with a complaint Lively made to HR about Baldoni’s allegedly creepy behavior on set — from kissing in ways the scene didn’t require, to inserting unnecessary sex scenes into the script, to asking Lively to perform nude in unprofessional ways. Without getting too deep into the details, it seems the two had clashed early on, and Lively took her concerns to HR. But the whole thing had seemed to have been squashed after a meeting and an agreement to move forward amicably. After all, they both had a financial stake in the movie doing well.

That is, until the months between wrap and release, when Baldoni noticed that Blake Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, had blocked Baldoni on Instagram. That’s when Baldoni, according the article, texted his production company’s publicist, about having “a plan for IF she does the same when movie comes out. Plans make me feel more at ease.”

Baldoni and Lively got in another feud during post-production, with Lively eventually winning a battle over final cut, and then planning a separate press tour for the movie with the two not doing appearances together. All of which culminated in Baldoni and his production company publicist hiring Melissa Nathan, “a crisis PR expert.”

Which is to say, and we shouldn’t lose sight of this part: this major Hollywood kerfuffle, involving countless lawyers, assistants, and expert consultants all trying to spin the narrative, all kicked off when one guy saw that his ex-coworker’s partner had blocked him on Instagram. Amazing.

Anyway, Baldoni’s production company, according to the piece, hired crisis PR expert Melissa Nathan, “whose clients have included Johnny Depp and the rappers Drake and Travis Scott.”

Nathan, in turn…

…went hard at the press, pushing to prevent stories about Mr. Baldoni’s behavior and reinforce negative ones about Ms. Lively. Jed Wallace, a self-described “hired gun,” led a digital strategy that included boosting social media posts that could help their cause.

It’s this last part, about boosting social media posts, which might help explain why a seemingly innocuous post of mine ended up being the most-viewed on my newsletter. The post had the semi-tongue-in-cheek headline “The movies are back,” with a picture of Baldoni and Lively as the banner image. The first part of it was me lightly trashing* Deadpool & Wolverine (starring Ryan Reynolds, the guy who blocked Justin Baldoni on Instagram) while praising It Ends With Us — for at least being based on a book. Which could certainly be interpreted, broadly, as sort of pro-Baldoni and anti-Reynolds post, though only at the most surface level.

Assuming this post was indeed an unwitting part of a strategy to boost posts friendly to Baldoni, that still leaves the question of how, exactly, that “boosting” works.

The New York Times, and even the subjects of the story intitiating said campaign themselves don’t seem to know either:

It is unclear exactly how Mr. Wallace operated. There are references in emails to “social manipulation” and “proactive fan posting,” and text messages cite efforts to “boost” and “amplify” online content that was favorable to Mr. Baldoni or critical of Ms. Lively.

“We are crushing it on Reddit,” Mr. Wallace [the digital strategy “hired gun”] told Ms. Nathan [the “crisis PR expert”], according to a text she sent Ms. Abel [the publicist working for Baldoni’s production company] on Aug. 9.

Indeed, these consultants seemed to do a lot of congratulating themselves for “shifting the narrative” without much evidence for it other than cherry-picked social media numbers.

The next day, one of Ms. Nathan’s employees texted, “We’ve started to see shift on social, due largely to Jed and his team’s efforts to shift the narrative.”

Ms. Nathan wrote to Ms. Abel: “And socials are really really ramping up. In his favour, she must be furious. It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women.”

“That our smear campaign against a woman is working just goes to show how much people want to hate women. It’s sad, really.”

This has to go down as one of the all-time great moments in the history of crisis PR. Big I Think You Should Leave hot dog meme energy.

For his part, Baldoni himself wondered how all this “narrative shifting” actually worked too.

On another occasion, he wondered whether they were deploying fake “bot” accounts on social media.

“I can fully fully confirm we do not have bots,” Ms. Nathan wrote, adding that any digital team would be too intelligent to “utilise something so obvious.”

Mr. Wallace’s operation, she wrote, “is doing something very specific in terms of what they do. I know Jamey & Jed connected on this.”

Well, if you say it’s “something very specific,” I suppose I don’t need to ask for any further clarification…

But was it bots?

If you interpret “bot” specifically as an automated script and not a real person, I can’t say for certain whether one of my random posts getting shared 60,000 times by a single email account was the work of a “a bot.” I suppose it could’ve been done manually, as part of some click-farming type situation. I certainly don’t have 194 different devices with which to open a single email. But if you gave a whole call center-type place access to an email address, it seems very doable.

Which is to say, if you interpret “bot” as any inauthentic user behavior designed to artificially inflate a number for a specific purpose, it seems almost certain this was “a bot.” In any case, asking “bot or not” seems like semantics, unless you’re in the specific business of manipulating those numbers.

And that, to me, seems to be the rub. The NY Times piece focuses (mostly for good reason) on Baldoni' & Co.’s shady motives in attempting this smear campaign. Another question that seems worth asking though, is whether it actually worked.

The premise of the article was that the smear campaign had worked, which would both help justify the article’s existence, and is a logical conclusion for it to draw, given that it was written in part thanks to evidence contained in a legal filing by Lively, seeking damages over the smear campaign.

Yet even their own evidence for this seems a little shaky.

The effort to tarnish Ms. Lively appears to have paid off. Within days of the film’s release, the negative media coverage and commentary became an unusually high percentage of her online presence, according to a forensic review she sought from a brand marketing consultant.

A brand marketing consultant, you say? We once had a mold abatement expert come to our house to test for mold. Shockingly, they discovered that we had mold. A brand marketing consultant discovering that there is much work to be done on a person’s brand feels a lot like that.

Ms. Lively[…] experienced the biggest reputational hit of her career. She was branded tone-deaf, difficult to work with, a bully. Sales of her new hair-care line plummeted.

“Is Blake Lively set to be CANCELLED?” read a Daily Mail headline one week into the attacks.

That Daily Mail piece, in turn, included such damning evidence as:

A clip from the August 8th UK screening of the film sees 36-year-old Gossip Girl alum pass on wearing the piece of jewelry because it didn't coordinate with her outfit.

A TikTok shared via AlloCiné showed the brief encounter between Lively and the fan, who'd handed over the pink friendship bracelet.

'Oh my gosh, thank you so much,' a seemingly grateful Blake said as she took the present before adding, 'I'm going to put it [away] because it doesn't go with my outfit but I will wear it later.'

The mother-of-four also told the fan the gesture was 'so sweet.'

What a bitch! Also, a negative TikTok and a hit piece in the Daily Mail? How will she ever recover???

There was also, according to the NY Times article, a Norwegian entertainment reporter named Kjersti Flaa, who “uploaded to YouTube a 2016 interview in which Ms. Lively snapped back when Ms. Flaa commented on her baby ‘bump’ and remained testy for the rest of the conversation. Ms. Flaa titled it ‘The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job.’”

“It wasn’t the first time [Flaa] had posted a video aligned with a client of Ms. Nathan. In 2022, in the midst of Mr. Depp’s legal battle with Ms. Heard, Ms. Flaa posted clips of her interviews with the actor, tagged #JusticeForJohnnyDepp,” the article continues.

So it sounds like this crisis PR expert knows a friendly junket reporter. Junket reporters (who get invited and disinvited to those junkets at the film distributor’s pleasure) aren’t exactly Woodward and Bernstein, so that checks out.

But let’s go back to that brand marketing consultant.

A brand marketing consultant, Terakeet, produced a report in August for Ms. Lively that concluded she had likely been the object of a “targeted, multichannel online attack” similar to one against Ms. Heard, and that it was damaging her reputation.

The report did not identify who was behind the attack. But by analyzing “the entirety of Google’s search index” for Ms. Lively’s name, it found that 35 percent of the results also included a reference to Mr. Baldoni.

Which proves… uh… something.

This was highly unusual given the length of her career, the company said, and suggested that the media environment was being manipulated.

An analysis of the numbers concludes… something weird was going on.

Fair. That was my conclusion as well. We might, however, wonder what any of those numbers actually added up to. To that end, the article does report that sales for Blake Lively’s hair care line declined precipitously, supposedly in the wake of the campaign.

A separate report, by Ms. Lively’s hair-care company, Blake Brown, concluded that the social media onslaught also had a negative effect on that business. Her product line, which had launched in August with record-breaking sales, estimates that it lost as much as 78 percent in sales.

Hold on, did you say that the report that found that her product line lost 78% in sales… was conducted by the hair-care company itself? The same one that would stand to gain in the legal filing the Times used to build its story around? I’m reminded again of the mold abatement expert.

In the case of my own post, the only observable result of artificially inflated numbers were those numbers themselves, which would be virtually meaningless, let alone even observable, to anyone but me and the people inflating them. It didn’t mean any more people actually saw the post, or that any of those who did came away with a higher opinion of Baldoni or a more negative one of Blake Lively. The logical conclusion was that those numbers mattered most to a person citing them as justification for their paycheck. See? Our campaign is working!

Seems to be a lot of that going around lately.

Meanwhile, the mere existence of this New York Times article seems like pretty strong evidence that the whole thing kind of backfired. I doubt many of us would’ve known about Ryan Reynolds blocking Justin Baldoni on Instagram, but now a lot of us know that Baldoni (allegedly) hired an entire team of character assassins to go after Blake Lively over it. And, thanks to that textbook example of the cover up being worse than the crime, we also know that the same dude allegedly hired one of his buddies to play Blake Lively’s OB/GYN so he could ogle her nearly nude on the set.

According to the same article, Baldoni has since been dropped by his agency, despite having just directed a wildly successful movie (the 14th highest-grossing movie of 2024 domestically, and 15th worldwide, with a much lower production budget than any of the movies ahead of it). Now he seems to be in career limbo. It seems he did experience the power of reputation, just not in the way he intended.

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This is a kooky Hollywood story, a story about niche internet numbers, and a self-referential story about this Substack. But it’s also a story about how all the numbers that were once intended to measure actual human behavior have become so hopelessly manipulated that they now mostly only measure that manipulation (see also: The Numbers Are All Fake).

Those numbers used to underpin the entire internet economy, a way to measure how many people actually saw certain media — which in turn influenced the prices people paid for ads, and how much money people in the media whose salaries were determined by those ad buys got paid. People gradually came to realize how easily manipulated those numbers were, they stopped representing much of anything at all, and the value of those ads tanked. And then lots of people like me lost our jobs.

While media as a whole is undoubtedly much shittier now, I’m not asking you to weep for me (won’t someone think of the bloggers??), and I’m certainly not asking you to weep for the advertising industry or the brands.

However, it does seem symbolic of the fact that we have all become, to some extent, hostage to this consultant class. Where we rely on numbers to try to measure effectiveness, performance, public opinion, whatever; they juke them to try to justify their own salaries. Whatever happens, they seem to come out on top.

The Democratic establishment spent most of this past fall crowing about their unprecedented fundraising numbers. We raised over a billion dollars, they screamed. Just think of all the influence that money could buy!

Instead, the same thing that happened in media happened in politics: Trump won the election, and all the fundraising numbers and opinion polls became moot. The gulf between actual human behavior and the numbers that supposedly measure them widened further. If there was a silver lining, it was for all of the consultants — the ones who spent years trying to convince us that Biden was competent, then more time convincing us that Harris was a great replacement, and then after that, spent still more months claiming that Harris ran a flawless campaign but just started so late that she could never have won anyway. They still all got paid anyway. We’re all tryin’ to find the guy who did this!

This feels like the part of the essay where I make my big stump speech for what we can do to fight back against rampant grifting and the tsunami of fake numbers. The truth is that I don’t really know. Every industry seems to have them and a decent portion of the economy seems to run on them. That seems bad. And until we have the power to change that, it seems like the best course of action is to do just our best to recognize the scam ecosystem for what it is and stop letting vested interests talk us out of our own common sense.

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*The seemingly relevant part of the post:

Pardon me for withholding my cheers for the Cards Against Humanity superhero movie, even if it had some cleverly-constructed jokes at the expense of the other Disney division its existence was meant to dissolve. (Disney also threw itself a pep rally this past week, complete with their own version of lifetime achievement awards, one of which it gave to Miley Cyrus).

The actual good news here was that the number two movie, It Ends With Us, starring Deadpool’s wife, Blake Lively (I doubt that factored much into its success but stranger things have happened) cost $25 million to make and ended up grossing $50 million in North America plus $30 million overseas.

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