Clearing a coordinated Facebook smear against a video production company

Like a lot of small studios, this company had a rough run through COVID. Work slowed, cash flow tightened, and a few vendor payments slipped by a couple of weeks.

They kept everyone in the loop the whole way through. Nobody went unpaid, and they came out the other side.

Freelancers who had never worked with them began posting publicly on Facebook, warning others not to take jobs from the company.

The posts claimed it never paid, that it dodged people, that money simply disappeared. None of it was true.

The revealing part was in the comments. People who had actually worked with the studio kept jumping in to say they had always been paid without any issue.

But that nuance did not matter to Google. The posts ranked on page one for the company's own name, so every client, hire and partner ran into them first.

Here is one of the posts as it appeared publicly, and the same link once we had it removed at the source.

We treated this as what it was: a coordinated wave of defamatory posts against a company that had done nothing wrong.

We audited every post, built the case against Facebook's own content policies, and had them removed at the source, then cleared from search.

Over about two months, the false narrative disappeared. Every defamatory post came down, and the results that carried them went with it.

Today, when someone looks up the company, those posts do not exist, and the story they were telling is gone too.