Rise of the fake experts
A search for a psychologist led to a world of fake experts, reports Stephanie Power
B
arbara Santini seems very busy. She’s a psychologist with a degree from the University of Oxford who advises on sex for a website called Peaches and Screams. According to the website, she has been
quoted in Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Metro, Hello Magazine, The Express, The Telegraph, The Mail, Woman and Home and others. When not giving quotes to journalists, she can apparently be found searching for treasures at Brick Lane market or renovating her Victorian house – she recently stumbled upon a hidden cellar at home. You’d have thought her surveyor might have found that earlier but, from the website, you get the impression that this is just SO Barbara. Rob Waugh is a freelance technology journalist. He ‘met’
Santini while working on a story about identity theft. “I’d spotted Barbara while looking at a website some
journalists use to find experts for quotes called Response Source. She was supposedly an Oxford-educated psychologist.” When Waugh tried to find her online, there was no trace of a
website or a way to actually speak to her other than through the Peaches and Screams sex toy website. If he was doubtful about Santini’s authenticity, her speed in
replying put the tin lid on it: “Real psychologists don’t respond to people two minutes after a request with 12 carefully crafted paragraphs of copy.” Looking for traces of Santini led Waugh to a host of fake
people often giving artificial intelligence-generated answers to journalists requesting expert comment. Take Fiona Jenkins. She has featured 170 times in the UK press,
giving gardening advice. Waugh says: “If she were a real person, she would be far more prolific than any other gardener in the media. She’s putting out quotes forwebsites called Find Your Job and Price Your Job. And the people behind Fiona Jenkins are targeting publications that are just looking for viral headlines at any cost and who don’t really check whether the people are real.” Why is this happening? Waugh says that, at first look, it appears PR companies are working to push quotes from organisations. But, he says,
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they’re not really PR companies – they are unscrupulous search engine optimisation people, using PR techniques to get links for their companies into publications. The reason that’s appealing to the companies getting the
coverage? It pushes them to the top of Google searches. As part of an interaction with Santini or maybe Jenkins, they will ask for a company mention or a link to their site. Newspaper websites have a high domain rating so getting your company website on there can be valuable. Waugh has been working with Press Gazette and NeoMam Studios, a creative content marketing agency that advocates for a human-centric approach to digital marketing. In one week in January alone, they found around 50 fake experts strutting their electronic stuff in the British media. And they uncovered more than 1,000 articles featuring people who are figments of someone’s imagination.
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