Releasing the Epstein Files and is LinkedIn Gender Biased?

David Gallagher (00:05):
Well, hey there, once again you found yourself to The Week UnSpun, our weekly live look at the world through the eyes of the PR professional, PR professionals from around the world. I'm David Gallagher, your designated Texan in England, of course.

Doug Downs (00:18):
And I'm Doug Downs, somewhere in western Canada, somewhere in western Canada.

David Gallagher (00:22):
And with our friend Farzana Baduel at a client conference today. We are saddened that we don't have her on screen, but we're delighted to have my friend and colleague Miranda, the absolutely fabulous Miranda Mitchell, with us. Miranda is the Managing Director of the Pretail Agency here in London, a colleague of ours at Folgate, and an absolute star figure in the UK PR scene. So welcome, Miranda. I didn’t even ask you earlier where you're dialing in today.

Miranda Mitchell (00:49):
Where am I from? Thank you, David. That’s such a lovely introduction. I'm here in sunny London. It’s actually sunny today. It was trying hard to snow this week, but today it’s lovely and sunny, and I'm super excited to be on this show. I think the first time I ever met you, you told me you wanted to do a podcast, and here you are. I’ve been watching along, and I think it's great. So yay, I’m finally on it.

Doug Downs (01:16):
The sun is shining just because you're here, Miranda. That’s obviously the thing.

Miranda Mitchell (01:21):
That’s smooth.

Doug Downs (01:22):
Okay, as usual, we've been looking at news stories. David’s teasing me. I kept texting him, WhatsApping him, “Hey, we should do this story. We should do this story.” So we’ve got a lot to get through. If you're watching live on LinkedIn, YouTube, X, or Instagram, or if you're listening to the audio replays, it's great to have you. If you're on the live though, get your comments in every time David says something that’s not how it is. Get in there and get your comments in. Reinforce your point. Do it live and we'll call them out. So a lot to get to, but I think number one is that Epstein story, David, that you called last week. You felt this one was going to percolate and fill the room, and it's filling the house.

David Gallagher (02:03):
Yeah, it’s more important, and I didn’t want to be right about it because it’s such a sad story. It’s a horrific story on a lot of levels, but it’s inevitable, and we committed ourselves to addressing the more prominent headlines. I just want to frame this for people who maybe, mercifully, aren’t exposed to the details of this story.

This is the Jeffrey Epstein story. He’s a financier from southern Florida, a well-known accomplice, friend, perhaps business associate of Trump, at least in the far past. The story goes back 20 years. Back in 2005, authorities were alerted to alleged improprieties with girls. Sometimes the media’s called them “underage women.” There’s really no such thing. They were girls.

He dodged some local and state charges and ended up doing some time in 2008 on, it’s not really house arrest, but a work release program. A lot of people thought it was a sweetheart deal. The U.S. Attorney at the time was a guy named Alex Acosta, who later became Trump’s Secretary of Labor. I don’t know if there’s any relationship there.

He was released and then rearrested on federal charges this time in 2019, this was in July, and was found dead in his cell just a month later. Since then, all hell has broken loose in terms of how this story has been presented and covered. Like it or not, it’s how a lot of people see the PR world in terms of what we do to either promote these stories or protect against them.

In the more recent history, there was a pledge from then-candidate Trump in his second campaign. He said, “Yeah, I’ll release the files.” There was some pressure from victims’ groups and local police to release the files. He said he would, then said he’d do it imminently. His press secretary at the time said that she had the client list on her desk and she’d be releasing them soon. There was a stunt at the Capitol where some right-wing influencers said they had the files. Turns out there weren’t really any files, and then they said, “We’re not going to do it. There weren’t any files after all. We’re closing the investigation.”

And then really, things started to pick up politically. Just this past week, the House passed a bill saying we need to release the files. The Senate passed exactly the same bill with one notable exception. President Trump did sign that into action, and now it’s meant to be released within 30 days. So, in theory, we should see something on the 19th of December. So I just want you guys, what’s your gut reaction, and what would you be thinking if you could put yourself in the minds of the White House press team right now?

Doug Downs (04:51):
Yeah, the waffle or the flip-flop from the Trump administration has been really weird because you’re right, after four years under Biden’s leadership, the Democrats just refused to release the files. And you’re right, mounting pressure. Trump ran on it saying, “I’ll release them.” Then he didn’t release them. Then we don’t have to. And now obviously there’s not just public pressure, but pressure within his own party to release the files.

I support the release of the Epstein files, but that one “no” vote I thought was really interesting from Congressman Clay Higgins, a Republican from Louisiana. He’s got a bit of a reputation as a rabble-rouser, a bit of a rascal. But when you dig into his reasoning, his objections are at least worth noting. Again, I support releasing the files, but he feels releasing raw investigative material could unfairly drag innocent people into the frenzy that’s about to come if the process leads to loose speculation or casual mentions. We should be careful not to condemn anyone based solely on a passing reference or the word of Jeffrey Epstein, who has zero credibility whatsoever.

Miranda Mitchell (06:02):
Wow. So yeah, there’s a lot to unpack. I think I’d just start with David, you asked what would we be feeling if we were White House Press Secretary? Probably like we wished we had a different job. Horrific.

I mean, I think the things that have struck me, he obviously does not want to talk about this and hasn’t wanted to talk about it, and didn’t want to release them. And whenever he was asked, it was the usual playbook of deflection or accusing somebody else. “You want to be looking at Bill Clinton or whoever else, Reid Hoffman.” Or he would just either have his usual kind of roster of things he would do, point to other people.

He’s done a lot recently, I’ve noticed, with female journalists where he just attacks them personally, from the “piggy” episode.

Doug Downs (06:56):
That’s terrible.

Miranda Mitchell (06:57):
“Be quiet, piggy,” through to, I think, another lady, Nancy, where he said, “You are a terrible journalist, and your network is terrible.” I just always find when I watch him, I am always, to use a word from Traitors UK, flabbergasted, because he runs to his own tune and we are constantly amazed that he gets away with it, and he does.

He’s ripped up that entire playbook of how you would behave as a member of the public, in professional or political life. And then he does it, and we all just take it, and it keeps happening. And I think with this, he doesn’t answer questions that are perfectly justified for the media to ask him. His responses are crazy and brazen and show, “I just don’t want to deal with this.”

And then the yo-yo thing that you described at the start, David, has been just that, a mess of somebody just trying to avoid something they can’t avoid. And now I think the other interesting part of this is his own Republican Party members turning on him, where perhaps they would have been scared to before and thought, “My God, I’m going to lose my job.” But they’ve held the line and done it anyway, which is slightly different from the normal run of events.

David Gallagher (08:14):
Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, for the master showman, and I know a lot of people give him credit for being this reality TV show star and knowing what the sense of America is and the stories they want to tell, here, he’s lost control of this story. And I take your point, Doug. I think people will get hurt, some of them probably innocently, as a result of this. And there’s no way this genie gets put back in the bottle. This will be the story of 2025, if not longer.

Miranda Mitchell (08:47):
I just wanted to add on that, for the victims thing, I do think that what they are going to release, and they're planning not to name the victims, but I think with so much information, stuff’s going to come out, which I think you were saying earlier, Doug, will be a rumor mill. The media will jump on it like rabid dogs and drag it out, and people who should have been protected will get caught up in the frenzy because this is not like anything else that’s ever happened before. But it’s probably the right thing because without this, people would hide who shouldn’t be hidden.

Doug Downs (09:23):
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Okay, story number two was that Cloudflare outage. Were either of you caught in that, where the internet got wobbly or blacked out for you earlier this week?

David Gallagher (09:35):
Yeah, I lost a couple of sites, but I didn’t even know what had happened until you told me what the story was, Doug.

Miranda Mitchell (09:41):
Yeah, I did too. You did too. I thought at first it was something to do with a particular server, and then I realized.

Doug Downs (09:49):
Yeah, so Cloudflare, if you’re catching up on this, suffered a significant three-hour outage that caused error messages and disruptions across major platforms worldwide. There’s no official estimate of how many users were impacted, at least two we know of. Cloudflare routes traffic for one-fifth, 20 percent, of all the websites around the world, which explains the wide-ranging impact that even briefly touched podcast delivery and airline operations.

The company later issued an explanation of what happened, and I think that’s the salient thing. Dan Neik, their CTO, issued a message on LinkedIn, owned up to it, apologized for it, and look at the responses here. That’s the point I’m trying to get across. When you’re that quick and that transparent with a good tone to a bad story, nothing but support.

Miranda Mitchell (10:46):
Yeah, I mean absolutely. It just ticked all the boxes of speed, transparency, owning up, saying sorry, leaning into that first explanation. It probably got super technical and went over most people’s heads, but then also the relevant stakeholders for their business, other CTOs, would be able to understand it.

And I think a really important point is before they announced it, already the rumor mill was going, is this a cyberattack?

Doug Downs (11:17):
And.

Miranda Mitchell (11:17):
So what at least it did is it clarified that. So overall, great job.

David Gallagher (11:22):
I completely agree. I did wonder or still wonder what any lawyer in the room was thinking because there was.

Doug Downs (11:28):
If they let any in, right?

David Gallagher (11:31):
Yeah, I was telling you guys before the show I was involved, well, we’ve all sat through these kinds of conversations when somebody’s had to make an apology for a mistake or an error. And I was involved with one, it was a major drug recall, a pharmaceutical recall. And the CEO, I think very similarly, made a heartfelt apology for any concern that the product and its recall might have caused. It turned out the product didn’t need to be recalled later on, but he did the right thing. But the lawyers hated it every step of the way.

Doug Downs (12:01):
Yeah, they want to change “we’re sorry” to “we regret” every time. Regret meaning this word. But yeah, so it’s really interesting about Cloudflare and the apology coming on LinkedIn. He must have used very masculine language because it worked. And David, that leads us to the LinkedIn story.

David Gallagher (12:20):
Well, yeah, and I wasn’t sure where the story was going to land when I first came across it. I host a pretty large WhatsApp chat, and on Wednesday, International Men’s Day, a few comments came up about, have you heard about this post that somebody had made? Somebody else said, yeah, I saw it. The post was about LinkedIn having some sort of bias, gender bias, where male posts were getting greater engagement and boost than female posts. That was kind of the gist.

I hadn’t heard anything like that before, so I took a quick look and there was quite a bit of discussion. I think the explanation I heard was that there’s a proxy bias. So it’s not necessarily that male equals greater boost or engagement, but the language that the algorithms use has a cultural bias toward more masculine language. That was just one of, I think, six or seven different metrics, which kind of made sense.

It also sounded a little bit, I know a lot of women said actually their personal experience was very different and very real and very demonstrable. And when I mentioned this to you, Miranda, you said, yeah, a hundred percent, that’s what I’m hearing too. So maybe we should ask a woman what your experience has been.

Miranda Mitchell (13:27):
So yeah, I’ve got a lot of thoughts on this and information. So I’m on a couple of WhatsApp groups with women, mainly women in marketing, and one particularly women in PR. It’s called Break the Silence. And that incredible group of women were really leaning into this, and several of them posted about it and also did the experiment themselves of changing their gender on LinkedIn in the settings to masculine.

Some went as far as changing their name using AI to generate a photo of themselves that looked a bit like themselves but made them male. But the net result was everybody saw an upward curve, bang like that, on all their posts.

Now of course, this is super anecdotal because there are loads of ways you could break down and attack and invalidate this and go, well, you were making changes to your picture, to your settings, and every time that happens, a change creates an uptick. Maybe the language in the post you were making was something that was a trending topic, blah, blah, blah.

So we know all this. We know it needs to be robust and looked at in a robust way with controls. But there are a couple of articles written, which I think you were alluding to, David. A guy, Martin Redstone, really interesting. He looked into it deeply, unpacked it, and he found it’s valid. Nobody is saying there’s a secret bit of code that says downgrade content from women. It’s much more complicated than that.

It’s probably because, how would I explain it in kind of layman’s terms, is that because the algorithm’s learning from real life, and real life has historical prioritization of men in business. That’s just a trope. This is what a professional businessman looks like. This is what good business language is. So it’s kind of very masculine language and all those things. And so actually, it’s filtering through everything based on stuff it’s learned about the world at large, systemically, socially, that’s out there.

David Gallagher (15:34):
Which is more insidious, right? I mean, you can’t just reverse a little bit of code. It’s actually more insidious than that.

Miranda Mitchell (15:41):
So it’s a big thing, I think, and it’s a bit more complicated than just a few people doing an experiment. And I think it will take a while to work out what’s really going on because women use the word “women” in their posts and use emotional language. And so it unpacks a whole world of how a voice is being pushed to the top and heard.

David Gallagher (16:08):
Yeah, we were saying what action would LinkedIn be expected to take? There are legal ramifications to this, right? I mean under at least data law here in Europe. Did you read anything further on that? I have to admit, I don’t know much about that, but I thought it might be something that would get somebody’s attention at LinkedIn HQ.

Miranda Mitchell (16:27):
I think a few people from LinkedIn have tried to respond. I read something where somebody had a dialogue and then they wrote up the dialogue, and that was mostly saying this isn’t purposeful. This is how the platform works. And there are some people that know how to optimize every post and what it does and doesn’t reward and some people that don’t.

I think you’re right, under UK and EU law there are a couple of buckets for discrimination in different forms, which this could sit under. But yeah, I guess the end point is it’s probably not them as a platform. It’s a reflection of something going on in the world at large.

Doug Downs (17:09):
Yeah, interesting. For me, part of this is it’s men writing code. It comes down to it’s 30-something and 40-something-year-old men, maybe some 20-somethings, living in Northern California writing code and not aware of their own biases.

David Gallagher (17:25):
Well, we could spend more time on that, but I do want to move on to, this is going to come to you, Miranda, but I’ll set this up a little differently. I was inspired by a podcast that I, Doug, and Farzana did, the Stories and Strategies podcast, and you had a great conversation with Nick Osborne, I believe in Montreal, and he’s got his own great story to tell. He’s a digital storyteller and kind of a guru on all things related to tech and comms, and he made some comments about how, I think he called it brand drift, and how we sort of regress to the meme when we use large language models.

So Doug, I just wanted to give you a chance to comment on that, but I also want to zoom back out, and I’ll come to you with a specific question about how you’re looking at AI at Pretail, Miranda.

Doug Downs (18:09):
Yeah, so real quick, and it sort of builds off of the LinkedIn story we just talked about. It’s where, I mean, we’re all using AI, and AI is learning our language. So I use ChatGPT, I use Claude, I don’t dip into Gemini as much, and I probably should. That’s on the to-do list. And I know the algorithm’s trying to understand how I like to phrase things or how different clients like to phrase things, which we’re informing it about.

But the truth is I’m letting AI write things for me, and a lot of us are. So the idea of brand drift is, well, the AI is changing your voice, and you don’t even know it.

Miranda Mitchell (18:47):
So yeah, I think brand drift is defined exactly as you say. It’s where even on Google, they’re creating an aggregated answer, and they may have scraped something that’s out of date. It may not be direct from the brand’s most recent website. It might be from just a member of the public talking about it on Reddit. So it’s all mashed up into this more vanilla thing, which isn’t what the brand spent fortunes crafting. So that’s right.

But I think when it comes to agencies, I think AI impacts and will be leveraged in quite different ways depending on your discipline. And PR is quite different from perhaps advertising and paid media agencies because I think how our output shows up in the world is different. I mean, I could go on, but I don’t want to just talk at you. What do you think, David?

David Gallagher (19:39):
No, I went to two talks, or one I went to, one I dialed into, but one was from an AI entrepreneur, and his view was literally that AI will kill agencies, that in a few years there just won’t be any reason for agencies to exist anywhere near the number or size that they are right now. So he saw it as an extinction event. That’s the word he used for agencies.

But I probably dialed into ten other talks, one last week, about how actually, especially with GEO and the importance put on earned media, that AI will save PR businesses as we get writing for the algorithms. It’ll actually move us up, move PR up the value chain. And I just have to believe the truth is probably somewhere in between.

Doug Downs (20:25):
Yeah, we just launched an experiment, and I’ll let you know in February how it went, where the whole attempt is to come up better in Gemini and ChatGPT. I’ve got two quick stories I want to run through. I want to barrel into the Cracker Barrel story.

Their shareholders got together, remember that fiasco where they changed the logo for Cracker Barrel? They got rid of Uncle Herschel, and that drove their main customer base throughout the southern US absolutely nuts. They brought Uncle Herschel back in a big nod to the whole brand. That did not go very well.

So they got together as shareholders and were deciding who on the board they were going to keep and who they were going to turf. And the result is CEO Julie Felss Masino keeps her job. Although she ticked off a lot of the customer base, she keeps her job. There was one board member who was turfed over this, and the share price is still down more than 50 percent this year. This is the crisis that really took a bite out of Cracker Barrel, and it has not gone away.

David Gallagher (21:29):
I did dig into this a little bit. It was a complete rebuild. The interior of the stores was changed, maybe some adjustments to the menu, I’m not sure about that. And then the logo was the more prominent feature. I think the reason given at the time was not out of concern of being woke or anything. It was realizing that their demographics were shifting, that the average customer was getting pretty old, and they needed to move into a different demographic with a different look and feel and brand.

We’ve all been in conversations where somebody said, we’ve got to change the brand for that. They clearly didn’t anticipate the backlash, whether that was bot-fueled or earnest or both. It’s had a material impact. So it almost doesn’t matter at this stage. So a lesson learned, I guess, is maybe a little more due diligence with your current users, not your expected users. Have you ever been to a Cracker Barrel, Doug or Miranda?

Doug Downs (22:27):
I have, yeah.

David Gallagher (22:28):
Okay.

Doug Downs (22:28):
Enjoyed it. Have not been back since.

David Gallagher (22:30):
So pretty good for breakfast. We’ll go there someday, Miranda, next time when we’re both in the US. I’ll take you to Cracker Barrel.

Miranda Mitchell (22:37):
Sounds good. Great.

Doug Downs (22:37):
Hey, I want to show you proof of a live show and how anything can happen on a live show. This is what happened on MSNBC during one of their live shows.

MSNBC Host (22:44):
The fact that 15 red states representing 30 senators account for about 10 percent of the entire population, and those 30 votes in the Senate get them...

MSNBC Guest (22:59):
Oh my goodness, son, I’m in the middle of a television show. You’re the only person I would ever answer the phone for. I’m going to have to call you back. Please, Tom, continue.

MSNBC Host (23:09):
That’s never happened before. I love that.

Doug Downs (23:11):
Anything can happen on a live show, anything. Basically, Miranda, you were amazing. I really appreciate you being on the show today.

Miranda Mitchell (23:20):
I love that clip.

David Gallagher (23:21):
I halfway expected Farzana to call one of us during the show just to see what would happen.

Doug Downs (23:27):
Check your text. She might have texted.

David Gallagher (23:29):
She might have.

Doug Downs (23:31):
I’m going to leave you with one last quote from Nelson Mandela: “If you talk to someone in a language they understand, that goes to their head. But if you talk to them in their own language, that goes to their heart.”

As always, thanks to superstar producers Emily Page and David Olajide. David was flying solo today. Emily wasn’t with us today. Extra special thanks to our guest, Miranda Mitchell.

The Week UnSpun is a co-production of Curzon Public Relations, Stories and Strategies Podcasts, and Folgate Advisors. The shows go fast, but you can catch the recordings on David’s LinkedIn channel, our YouTube channel, as well as Apple or Spotify for the audio. Actually, Spotify for the video. We’ve started putting the video up there. Thanks for listening.