Digital Red Herrings

The internet has industrialized the red herring. When a company faces a scandal, its communications team floods social media with unrelated stories designed to push the negative coverage down the feed. The original story is never addressed — it simply drowns in noise.

Political campaigns use the same tactic. A candidate caught in a controversy immediately shifts the conversation to an emotional but unrelated topic: immigration, crime, or celebrity gossip. Voters who followed the original story find themselves arguing about something else entirely, and the controversy quietly disappears.