u/Many-Scene-4268

We've got some great stories for tonight, so come hang out.

Harvey Weinstein rushed to hospital. NY businesses complaining about MSG shut down during busy World Cup Weekend. A couple climbed the Empire State Building and got arrested for it.

Come hang out or watch the replay!

https://www.youtube.com/live/6thhGoWA8Sc?si=noQTk99-CkpWNl4m

The movies they are going to make about this president 50 years from now will be totally outrageous and unbelievable on the one hand, and totally true on the other. Just when we thought Four Seasons Landscaping couldn't be topped, Donald Trump threw himself an MMA 80th birthday bash (at great expense to the tax payer no doubt) that will forever be remembered as ridiculous and embarrassing.

We've got a ton of stories to talk about including a bizarre Hollywood murder and more.

Los Angeles D.A. is looking into s@xual battery charges against Diddy, and the allegations against him are utterly hideous.

We're also reading more from the Pope's message about A.I. and the human race.

We're talking Lively's day in court and Pope Leo's message to big tech.

We're talking Lively v Baldoni and Pope Leo's message to big tech. Come and hang out with us.

This man has lieabetes.

Lets not forget that he trolled Blake and Taylor at the height of the smear campaign with his TMZ IG post.

Lets not forget that he was Ye's manager during snakegate.

Lets not forget he constantly trolled TS while he was managing the beibs.

Lets not forget that the only way he'd give Taylor a chance to buy her own music back was with an NDA for her to never talk bad about him and to still have 30% ownership of her music.

NOBODY LIKES YOU DUDE! except for Bibi maybe, embarrassing

Tom Hardy locked himself in his trailer and refused to come out for hours leaving Helen Miran and Pierce Brosnan waiting and fuming. We'll talk about what we heard about why he did it.

Matthew Perry's Assistant gets 3.5 years in prison for his part in the occidental overdose that ended Matthew Perry's life.

Come hang out.

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Too Real Live is an entertainment podcast hosted by blacklisted filmmaker Dale Wheatley alongside his partner, Angela. Dale and Angela cover everything from the latest Hollywood tea, true crime, or whatever comes to mind, every weekday from 6-8P est.

MJ the Lawyer turned the *totally organic* & *very normal* comments on the Blake Lively post in to a song

Instant classic! ily MJ :D

*Edit to add OP comment:

I know there are real people who genuinely support Justin Baldoni. That’s not what I’m talking about here. People are allowed to have different opinions about Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds, this lawsuit, all of it.

But can we at least admit something weird is happening online?

Because if this isn’t Justin Baldoni’s team or some coordinated campaign… then who is it?

Why does this exact same flood of identical, hostile, formulaic comments from accounts with no presence appear under nearly every post about Blake Lively or Ryan Reynolds?

You can dislike Blake Lively. Fine. You can think she’s wrong. Fine.

But the scale, timing, repetition, and uniformity of these comments does not feel organic. Especially when the accounts and comment patterns look so similar over and over again. How do we argue this is organic?

And again, if you think it’s not coordinated, okay. Totally fine.

But then what is it?

Because something is clearly amplifying this narrative in a way that does not happen equally on the other side.

Assuming that it's not Justin Baldoni's team, wtf is it?

Politicians manipulate our algorithms. These campaigns use comment sections to spread manufactured consensus.

Look for it and it's all you can see.

If Lively v Baldoni did nothing else it exposed a group of elite publicists who make their living by destroying the reputations of women, or perhaps anyone who gets in their way. A new, independent analysis of the data suggests that Taylor Swift, Roan Chappell, and Blake Lively were all victims of a smear campaign carried out in large part by bots.

For anyone who missed it, I highly recommend this recent Vulture article, "The Feed Is Fake: That 'viral' song, movie, meme, influencer, and celebrity drama was probably the product of a stealth marketing campaign." Here's a link to the paywall-free version: https://archive.ph/2026.05.15-111148/https://www.vulture.com/article/social-media-feeds-chaotic-good-projects-clipping.html . Please give the original link a click as well: https://www.vulture.com/article/social-media-feeds-chaotic-good-projects-clipping.html .

Much of the article is about "clipping" -- a tactic to boost content on social media, popularized a few years ago by influencers like Andrew Tate -- in which gig workers are paid to create and post short clips of content about a particular topic so that algorithms detect interest in that topic and push more of that content into people's feeds, eventually generating authentic interest/engagement. (Other "boosting" tactics that more blatantly violate platforms' terms of service include manipulation of likes, upvotes, and views/click-through rate.)

The section of the Vulture article that most interested me was about "narrative campaigns," which are often used in conjunction with boosting tactics like clipping:

>Clipping just puts an artist in front of more eyeballs; narrative campaigns tell those eyeballs what they’re seeing. Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren explained the idea to Billboard at South by Southwest. “A lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse,” he said. “Most people see a video or see something about an album that came out and it’s like the first thing that they see, or that first comment that they see, is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.” In other words, in a world drowning in information, nobody has the time to form an opinion from scratch anymore, so they check captions, comments, and quote tweets to see what people who seem like them have to say. And if everybody is outsourcing their first impressions to the crowd, why not just manufacture the crowd? Co-founder Andrew Spelman gave the example of a musical performance on Saturday Night Live: “The second SNL drops at midnight, you should post a hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year.”

I know it's been discussed to death, but the infamous "bump video" from the Blake Lively lawsuit is a really good case study of how this can work. For those who don't know, Kjersti Flaa, the interviewer in that video, originally posted the clip online in 2016. She even got the Norwegian media outlet that employed her at the time, TV 2, to frame it in a way that was sympathetic to her perspective -- suggesting that Lively was rude and condescending. Here's a link to that 2016 article (screenshots of English translation below): https://www.tv2.no/underholdning/8485945/

https://preview.redd.it/ar5vr95pvp2h1.png?width=1292&format=png&auto=webp&s=9eaab629db4fcbf748ea70bc1de038261381473b

https://preview.redd.it/1zuxg52rvp2h1.png?width=747&format=png&auto=webp&s=ccfbdeaa942362cdc8c139708d35d042d3b1ee91

The TV 2 article (which included the interview clip) was posted to social media -- Facebook -- at the time. Here's a link to the Facebook post, which received 742 likes, 340 comments, and 37 shares: https://www.facebook.com/tv2nyheter/posts/10154562887614750 . Below are screenshots of the top comments on that post, translated to English with commenters' names redacted:

https://preview.redd.it/ojextuk0yp2h1.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=cec99ceb9daad04e995aad475a9ace3b04f35787

If you happened to get this post pushed into your Facebook feed back in 2016 (which wasn't particularly likely to begin with, given the engagement stats) and decided to skim the top comments to see what other people generally thought, your impression would have been that opinions were mixed. Some people thought Lively and Parker Posey were a bit rude, but others (including the most-liked commenter) thought the interviewer's remarks/questions were inappropriate and kind of sexist. Overall, your takeaway might have been "seems like no one was at their best here, oh well, moving on."

Contrast this with when a (re-edited, re-titled) clip of the same interview was posted to Reddit on August 14, 2024 (right after a TAG PR employee sent the clip to a colleague noting that "We should send to [digital fixer] Jed [Wallace], right?"). Here's a link to that post on the subreddit FauxMoi: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1ertsu2/the_blake_lively_interview_that_made_me_want_to/. (Like many of the Reddit posts from the alleged August 2024 digital campaign, the OP has been deleted -- make of that what you will -- but it is archived elsewhere.) As you'll see, the post has 12K upvotes and 1.2K comments. The Reddit archive shows even more upvotes when the post was captured -- 16.79K -- which, as one of Lively's experts notes in his report, is a sign that Reddit's system flagged the post for vote manipulation and removed some of the upvotes, albeit after the post had already gone viral.

Here are some of the top comments on that FauxMoi post, with the non-deleted usernames blacked out:

For comparison, here is the TAG scenario planning document with suggested talking points about Blake \"weaponizing feminism\" etc: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.1.4_1.pdf

Note that there were Redditors on that 2024 post expressing views similar to the top comments on the 2016 Facebook post, but their comments were all downvoted to the bottom/minimized:

https://preview.redd.it/676wzhnv7q2h1.png?width=638&format=png&auto=webp&s=5e2de3834e8b015edd2f17d02c30d68262075d36

So if you saw this post back in 2024 -- which, unlike the 2016 Facebook post, was very likely to have made it into your feed -- and decided to skim the top comments to see what people thought, your takeaway would have been "wow, I guess Blake Lively was really awful in this interview. And seems like this is part of a larger trend of everyone noticing/discussing all the other ways she's awful -- maybe I should get in on this trend!"

Multiply that reaction by the thousands, and that's how these narrative campaigns shape public opinion.

****

Speaking of comment sections, I hate how the comments on posts about the Lively case always become a food fight about whether she actually is a "mean girl," which "team" you're on, etc etc. Plus my investment in this case, like others', is about the larger implications of narrative campaigns and other forms of digital manipulation in areas like politics. So in closing, I'd like to invite people to reflect on a time when your opinion was shaped by a quick skim of apparent online consensus (we all do it!). I know I've let my social media feeds shape which current events/issues I pay attention to and advocate for -- which can be benign or even positive, but I also wonder in retrospect which other issues were getting ignored/overlooked/actively suppressed at the time...