Cloudbrink’s legal issues shine highlight on growing field of popularity management

The continued legal saga surrounding Cloudbrink Inc. involves allegations of fraudulent conduct which have drawn attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice — and within the midst of this turmoil, the corporate has pursued a technique to raise its online popularity and burnish the image of Chief Executive Prakash Mana.

SiliconANGLE has learned that earlier this 12 months Cloudbrink formed a business relationship with Blue Ocean Global Technology, a Recent York-based marketing agency that promotes itself as “your brand and popularity management partner.”

The marketing agency’s engagement comes on the heels of a lawsuit brought by Cloudbrink co-founder Subbu Ponnuswamy against Mana and the corporate’s board of directors in December. The allegations include use of fraudulent “customer quotes, invoices and buy orders” and an orchestrated “illusion of success that was then shared with the Board and current and prospective investors.”

Blue Ocean’s work on behalf of Cloudbrink, a high-performance connectivity and security service provider, includes an interview with Mana posted on its website, and it maintains a personal webpage for the Cloudbrink executive. Cloudbrink has also been the topic of positive reviews posted on Google LLC in recent months.

Google reviews for Cloudbrink included testimonials that highlighted the “product’s reliability, ease of setup and helpful support team.” Coincidentally, names related to the posted Google reviews matched those listed on the leadership page or affiliated as bloggers for a corporation called Girl Power Talk, whose co-founders are Sameer Somal and Rachita Sharma, top executives of Cloudbrink’s popularity management partner Blue Ocean.

Inside 24 hours after SiliconANGLE sought comment from Cloudbrink and Blue Ocean about these Google reviews, they were removed. Here’s a screenshot of the postings before they disappeared:

Cloudbrink has actively promoted its relationship with Girl Power Talk in recent months. The corporate issued a press release in September announcing the donation of a complimentary license for its high-performance secure access service, and recently posted a YouTube video that highlighted the partnership.

Blue Ocean didn’t reply to an inquiry from SiliconANGLE. A spokesperson for Cloudbrink didn’t provide SiliconANGLE with a press release from the corporate in response to a request for comment.

Control over online information

Cloudbrink’s engagement with Blue Ocean reflects the growing influence of the secretive online popularity management field. The popularity management software market alone has been valued at $5.2 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at an annual rate of 13% between now and 2031.

“This is completely a growth industry,” Adam Holland, project manager on the Berkman Klein Center for Web and Society at Harvard University, said in an interview with SiliconANGLE for this story. “There’s at all times going to be a marketplace for individuals who want or need to manage information online.”

Company executives encountering hostile headwinds within the press or social media are sometimes the targets of unsolicited communications from popularity management firms who advertise their services. One company executive, who preferred to stay anonymous, shared these “pitches” with SiliconANGLE. In a single solicitation, the firm promised to “put this negative content previously – where it belongs,” and one other pledged that it could “completely remove negative news articles from the Web.”

The main target of the popularity management business has shifted lately, in line with Ambuj Kumar, chief executive officer of Simbian Inc., a provider of online security services.

“Repute management began with primarily monitoring social media,” Kumar said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “Imagine being a small restaurant owner or an executive in high tech and receiving an anonymous post. Over time, though, the services have grown from being reactive to proactively managing the net presence.”

Removing negative press

This proactive approach extends to controlling the media as well. SiliconANGLE has itself been the goal of an try and remove a story in regards to the Cloudbrink lawsuit published last December. The media firm was notified in early October of a “takedown request” for its Cloudbrink story, alleging plagiarism. It was filed with Google under provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA, a law passed by Congress in 1998 that was designed to guard against online content rights violations.

The DMCA filing against SiliconANGLE’s story was created using a backdated article technique. The fraudulent notice sender created a duplicate of the unique story, backdated it and posted it in a Tumblr link under a fictitious writer’s name. When Google received the DMCA request, it verified the backdated content and blocked the legitimate story from online search.

SiliconANGLE filed a counter notice with Google, presenting evidence of the fraud. Google has reinstated SiliconANGLE’s story on Cloudbrink as originally published in December.

Fraudulent DMCA takedown notices using the identical technique on Tumblr were also submitted against SFGate, co-owned together with the San Francisco Chronicle by Hearst Publishing, in search of to remove its story on Cloudbrink. The SFGate story has remained searchable on Google.

SiliconANGLE reached out to each Google and Tumblr for comment on the DMCA “fake takedown” process. Google didn’t reply to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Automattic Inc., which acquired Tumblr in 2019, issued the next statement:

“At Automattic we’re keenly aware of the varied ways in which bad faith actors abuse the notice and takedown means of the DMCA to silence critics or have controversial material faraway from the web. That is a problem that we have now written about extensively in our Transparency Report and accompanying blog.

While other platforms mechanically remove content upon receipt of a takedown notification, we take great care to guard our users from fraudulent notices by scrutinizing them for abuse and pushing back where appropriate. We now have taken – and won – legal motion against complainants for abuse of the DMCA. We don’t condone or permit the usage of any of our services for the submission of false copyright claims.”

DMCA under scrutiny as requests grow

Google currently controls nearly 90% of the worldwide online search market and the variety of DMCA requests for content removal which can be submitted to Google annually has grown at an astounding rate. In accordance with the Google Transparency Report, rights holders have asked Google to remove over 10 billion “copyright infringing” URLs from search results for the reason that inception of DMCA in 1998.

Google began processing DMCA takedown requests at a rate of a few million per 12 months within the 2000s. That swiftly rose to 1 billion in 2016, however the implementation of anti-piracy algorithms slowed the pace of requests. Nonetheless, partially driven by growing interest in popularity management, the quantity has accelerated again and Google now reports that it’s handling DMCA takedown requests at a record rate of two.5 billion per 12 months, which equates to about 5,000 per minute.

Cloudbrink’s engagement of Blue Ocean to enhance its online image offers only one example in a sea of activity by corporations in search of to shape the net narrative. DMCA is certainly one of a number of tools available to popularity management firms in search of to deliver for his or her clients.

The U.S. Congress held hearings in 2020 to debate reform of DMCA. Little or no has happened since then.

“There are at all times calls to reform the DMCA from various sides,” Holland told SiliconANGLE. “Many persons are eager about that. Fundamentally, it is a query of scale. Where would you or anyone just like the see the balance struck?”

Image: Microsoft Designer