Crowd Source: Inside the company that fakes it all... for a price

April 5, 2016 5:01 AM

It's just theater, right? But the lines get blurry and the waters get murky...

Crowds on Demand brands themselves as "the experts at celebrating your top salesperson, your best clients or a family member with a memorable and fun event!" But it's not that simple. Not surprisingly, staged protests are the company's "growth sector." The concept seems to place them on the edge of a pretty slippery slope.

posted by I_Love_Bananas (16 comments total)

Story from The Atlantic last year: Donald Trump's campaign hired actors to pack the room for his candidacy announcement. Other politicians do similar.
posted by ardgedee at 5:14 AM on April 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Fake it till you make it...
posted by pharm at 5:44 AM on April 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich
posted by Bob Regular at 6:01 AM on April 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

A million years ago, when I was doing temp work, I got a call from one agency to do something like this. I turned it down, feeling that I couldn't fake enthusiasm for someone or something I knew nothing about. The request felt so slimy I still shiver when I think about it. But that's work nowadays: fake enthusiasm and passion for something that inspires neither.
posted by aureliobuendia at 6:03 AM on April 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

Yeah, this struck me as a really good implementation of an idea (ethical standards! decent pay!) that will almost immediately be co-opted by horrible people for horrible reasons. The sentence in there that really terrifies me is this one:

A candidate might muster 500 supporters to a speech on a college campus, but if Adam sent just five recruits to demonstrate outside the auditorium, he discovered that the media would give equal coverage to both the rally and the demonstration.

For sale: democratic principles. Cheap.
posted by Mayor West at 6:16 AM on April 5, 2016 [11 favorites]

Makes me think of the Brooks Brothers Riot in 2000.
posted by octothorpe at 6:18 AM on April 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

So the next niche is hired crowds of listless, indifferent people to stand in the way of the fake-enthusiastic crowd and minimize their impact. You could pay 100 people to stand looking at their phones, right in front of the 5 fake protesters.

I would be pretty good at that , I think.
posted by cubby at 6:54 AM on April 5, 2016 [17 favorites]

Back in the 1970s, the People's Temple used to serve this same function in San Francisco. Then they moved to Guyana.
posted by grounded at 7:02 AM on April 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

Reminds me a little of the ancient practice of hired mourners.
posted by baf at 9:02 AM on April 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

My first visit to the Whiskey-A-Go-Go in LA featured an unknown metal/hair band (to me, anyway) called Leatherwolf. This was in the very early 1980's. There may have been a total of 30 people in the club, and it became painfully obvious that at least 20 were paid shills for the band. The paid-for posse screamed, "Leatherwolf, Leatherwolf" at every break in the action, to demonstrate to whomever may have been there from a record label that Leatherwolf did, indeed, have a following, when in fact, they were so bad that they were doomed to not succeed. It was tragicomic, to be sure.
posted by Lynsey at 9:37 AM on April 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm just gonna highlight this paragraph:

According to Adam, a young man hired Crowds on Demand to provide support at a college expulsion hearing. The school allowed the subject of the hearing to present testimony from members of the community. While the student had two friends willing to stand before the board and testify, he asked Adam to provide 20 more. One after another, they introduced themselves as the student’s longtime friends, mentors, classmates, colleagues, and employers and read heartfelt endorsements, all written by the student himself. The board elected not to expel Adam’s client.

Not so much "slippery slope" as "vertical cliff," right here. If this is the kind of thing this CEO is willing to talk about, imagine the stories he didn't tell.

Incidentally, I would be extremely surprised if it wasn't a sexual violence case.
posted by ostro at 10:54 AM on April 5, 2016 [14 favorites]

If money is speech, a hired crowd is just a crowd.
posted by Obscure Reference at 12:44 PM on April 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is the oldest trick in the book for politicians yall. These companies didn't invent ballot stuffing or IRL astroturfing. All the tech angle is doing is opening the malfeasance to individuals like that expulsion case.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 3:12 PM on April 5, 2016

And yet, Jeb Bush with all his campaign money didn't pack his events with enthusiastic fakers so he didn't have to say "please clap" when he finished? That just proves he wasn't competent enough to be President.
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:48 PM on April 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

I've been thinking a lot recently about how regularly we build our likes and dislikes (and ourselves) not off of actual experience but off of our interpretation of the reactions of others. Humans are social creatures, but sometimes the cost seems really high.
posted by Deoridhe at 6:24 PM on April 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

Favorite the post. People, you must favorite the post before you leave or we have no way to track your participation. People who do not favorite the post will not be paid!
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:42 PM on April 5, 2016 [2 favorites]