Chris Syme, New Media/Technology Committee Chair, reviews the book Digital Assassination: Protecting Your Reputation, Brand, or Business Against Online Attacks.
Syme recommends this book on the looming potential of "digital destruction" facing all of us. You can follow Syme via her website and on Twitter.
Digital Assassination is an eye opener. If you didn’t understand the unbelievable power of the internet to ruin lives and organizations before you read the book, you will after. But authors Mark Davis and Richard Torrenzano don’t point a finger of blame at the internet or even at social media. On the contrary, through vivid history lessons, they remind us that character assassination is not new—the 24/7, instant global reach of the internet is.
Taking us back to the covert, personal attacks that Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton leveled at each other through journalistic outlets, we see that public human cruelty is not new. As the authors said, “this books starts with the insight that the underlying issue is not the proliferation of dangerous technologies, but the amplification of human meanness.”
Character assassination is not to be confused with viral publicity based on bad acts, hubris, 
incompetence, or lack of intelligence (Anthony Weiner, Tiger Woods, Toyota, etc.). These are acts of character suicide. Character assassination is a deliberate act to cause harm by lying, stretching the facts, or devising a new context for the facts.
The tendency to fling mud was checked in the twentieth century somewhat by traditional media, whom the authors say maintained a moral compass of sorts under the umbrella of professional journalism. But the internet and social media have given rise to a new crop of “journalists” with no such professional expectation, only a desire for fame powered by bias.
The authors work their way through the seven digital swords—the weapons of digital assassination. Each chapter overflows with case studies, many of them famous or infamous. They are:
1. New Media Mayhem: from the printing press on, new media has been a disruptive force.
2. Silent Slashers: anonymous attackers that exploit the reach and speed of the internet while not identifying themselves.
3. Evil Clones: people pretending to be someone in the know or a person of authority, when in fact they are not.
4. Human Flesh Search Engines: Crowd sourcing public opinion and relying on popular search engine results to push a story. A nod here to Google, who now posts SERPs by popular posting regardless of fact or fiction.
5. Jihad by Proxy: organizations pretending to have pure motives that in fact are causal or political. They include sponsored news organizations such as the Huffington Post (left) and the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity (right) that are actually fronts for political ideologies.
6. Truth Remix: the authors describe this weapon as “ordinary human imperfection that can be exaggerated, turning commonplace failings and vices into horrendous crimes.”
7. Clandestine Combat: Outright stealing or hacking of information for purposes of destruction.
Crisis managers and communication directors should take notes while reading. Any crisis plan should include strategies for combatting the weapons of digital destruction. Know your enemy, because as the authors say, “a third of the world has a lot of laws, a third has some laws, and a third of the world has no laws.”
Today, servers in countries with no laws can be used to hack, lie, steal, and kill, and there isn’t a whole lot that can be done to prevent it. In addition to mounting a call to prepare and understand, the authors remind us that the law hasn’t quite caught up with digital destruction yet. Even though you could sue the New York Times for a letter to the editor defaming you, you can’t take any action about a comment left on a blog at nytimes.com. Don’t think the digital assassins out there don’t know that. Gird your loins, lest you be the next victim of digital assassination.