FIR #529: Fake Quotes from Fake Experts Find Their Way Into Top-Tier Media

A Press-Gazette investigation found that dozens of experts quoted in the mainstream media don’t actually exist, and PR agencies are unwittingly sharing them with the press. This poses a credibility issue for the agencies and the media. It requires a layer of verification unlike anything we’ve faced before. Also in this episode, crisis communication has long been housed in the PR or communications department. Should it be a governance responsibility of the C-suite? That’s the case made in a new report from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and the Institute of Directors. In his Tech Report, Dan York covers an initiative to close the AI language gap, including video moves by YouTube and Bluesky, smart glasses, and enhancements to Threads’ podcast toolkit. Links from this episode: Chartered Institute of Public Relations and Institute of Directors publish Crisis Communication Handbook for Boards Executive Reputation: Priced, Prized and Easily Lost Kate Winick: This Is a Bad Brand Clapback Converse Ad Sparks Controversy Over Racist Imagery Virtual Reality: The Widely Quoted Media Experts Who Are Not What They Seem Qwoted Bans AI-Generated Expert Profiles as PR Spam Floods Reporters’ Inboxes Prominent Art Therapist Quoted by Vice, Forbes and Others Is AI-Generated The Rise of Fake AI Experts: A Wake-Up Call for the Community The Rise of the Fake Expert: How to Remain Authentic in an Inbox of Fakes Links from Dan York’s Tech Report: Closing AI’s Language Gap: Why the Internet Society Is Joining a Global Commitment Bluesky Now Lets You Upload 10-Minute-Long Videos What’s New at Made on YouTube 2026? New YouTube Live Tools for Fan Funding, Dubbing and More Everything Announced at Meta Connect 2026 Snap Launches $2,195 Specs Smart Glasses Threads Expands Podcast Toolkit for Creators and Listeners The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, October 26. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected]. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript: Shel Holtz: Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode 529 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California. Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson in Somerset in the UK. Shel Holtz: Neville, it is wonderful to be back together with you again. Neville Hobson: It’s been a bit of a strange few weeks because of some health issues I’m working through. They’ve affected my availability to record our midweek shows. I was particularly keen to make sure we could record the topics we’re discussing today. Hopefully, by the time our next monthly episode comes around, I’ll be close to normal again. Shel Holtz: My fingers are certainly crossed. To accommodate all of this, we’re recording a shortened version of our monthly episode: two topics plus Dan York’s report. We’ll also have a quick recap of the two episodes since our last monthly show. Neville Hobson: Episode 527 was a particularly interesting long-form show with six topics. Our lead story was about a senior manager who discovered that AI was rejecting job applications within seconds of their arrival. One reason was that applicants had graduated from college before 2010, even though the instruction was to surface candidates who displayed “youthful energy.” What’s worse, the talent acquisition manager saw no liability issue because AI had made the decision. If I recall correctly, she said, “We’re okay. We have no liability because the AI made the decision.” If it weren’t so serious, it would be hilarious. We also discussed an expert witness who used ChatGPT to prepare a report for a legal case. The prompts he used—not just the AI’s output—were uncovered during discovery and entered into evidence. You have to check these things. Then, in episode 528, we talked about fandom. We explored the differences among fans, audiences, and communities. A fan’s identity can become tied to a team, artist, product, or other object of passion. It’s no surprise that marketers want their brands to inspire that kind of excitement, but not everything has the potential to develop a fan base. We received a couple of comments about that episode. Shel Holtz: Brian Kilgore in Toronto wrote, “Good show. In my life, I’ve worn Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy clothes, an MG T-shirt, and a sweatshirt I designed using ASCII code as the hook for CNCP telecommunications. One cap that I’ve lost says ‘Nikon Most Excellent.’” Brian has been a fan of quite a few things. We also received an audio comment from our tech reporter, Dan York. Dan York: Hey, Shel and Neville. I had a comment on episode 528. I found myself cringing when I heard marketers talking about how to grow a fandom. You have fans, and marketers should find where those fans are and engage with them. They shouldn’t be trying to build a fandom. You were right that fandom can be part of someone’s identity. My neighbors across the street are big Mazda Miata owners. They each have one, and they go on rallies and tours with other owners. It’s a community and a group, but being Miata owners is also part of who they are. To its credit, the local Mazda dealership supports that community. There’s a lot of fandom on Reddit, too. I own a Hyundai Santa Cruz, a little vehicle that’s rather like an SUV with a truck bed on the back. Its subreddit has people sharing photos, asking questions, and talking about what they’re doing with their vehicles. Some are passionate about these little trucks. I’ve seen that with other vehicles as well. Marketers and communicators, please don’t talk about trying to create a fandom. Find the fans where they are. Shel Holtz: Thanks, Dan. I couldn’t agree more. If there’s a fan base around something you make or represent, by all means, see how you can support it and become more visible to it. Trying to build a fan base around something that doesn’t naturally inspire one can feel artificial. I hadn’t thought to look for those communities on Reddit. I have a Ford Mustang Mach-E, and as soon as we’re done recording, I’m going to look for a Mach-E subreddit. I have to believe there is one. I appreciate the comment. I also want to mention Circle of Fellows. Episode 133, part two of our conversation on AI and the leadership moment for the communication profession, should be available by the time you hear this. Adrian Cropley returned, and we were joined by Mary Hills, Cyrus Mavalwala, and Robin McCasland. Our next episode is Thursday, October 29, at 6 p.m. Eastern. That hour accommodates Zora Artis, who will be joining us for a discussion of connection and leadership. Three other Fellows will join us as well. You’ll find details on the FIR Podcast Network website. Neville Hobson: Let’s talk about crisis communication—or, more precisely, governance. When we talk about crisis communication, many of us picture what happens once a crisis is underway: the holding statement, the spokesperson, media response, frantic internal calls, whether the CEO should go public, and how quickly the organization says something. But a new handbook from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ Crisis Communications Network, published with the UK’s Institute of Directors, argues that this way of thinking starts far too late. The handbook, Crisis Communication for Boards: A Handbook for Good Governance, argues that crisis communication belongs within governance, risk management, and organizational resilience. By the time a crisis breaks, many factors that determine how well an organization responds have already been decided. Has the board understood the risks? Has it treated reputation as a strategic risk? Are escalation routes in place? Can uncomfortable information move quickly from the front line to senior management and the board? Have stakeholder relationships been built before they’re urgently needed? Has anyone rehearsed making decisions quickly under scrutiny with incomplete or conflicting information? The handbook’s point is that crisis management begins long before a crisis hits, and boards should own it as part of their responsibility for organizational resilience. Communication runs through crisis management because it shapes how events are understood, how decisions are interpreted, and whether trust is maintained or lost. One line early in the handbook captures the argument: “You cannot communicate your way out of a crisis that you behaved your way into.” That shifts the communicator’s role. If communications is brought in only after management has made its decisions, when the organization is already under pressure, the communicator starts at a disadvantage. Senior communicators should be involved earlier to help boards understand how decisions may be perceived, where stakeholder concerns are emerging, which assumptions may be wrong, and where the organization’s behavior may be creating reputational risk. That means treating communications as an intelligence function as well as a messaging function. The handbook emphasizes horizon scanning, stakeholder relationships, and the flow of information throughout the organization. Emerging risks increasingly cross legal, regulatory, HR, operations, technology, and communications boundaries. Communicators can help boards understand what’s happening and what it may mean for trust, legitimacy, and reputation. The handbook is blunt about the consequences of getting this wrong. Poor or delayed communication can itself become a reputational risk. Minor incidents can escalate, information can become trapped in silos, and boards can lose touch with what employees, customers, and other stakeholders are saying. Once trust is damaged, recovery can take years. It also addresses AI, cyber risk, misinformation, and the speed at which reputational issues spread. With AI, it asks familiar governance questions: Who decided? Who verified? What accountability was in place? Technology can change the nature and speed of a crisis, but it doesn’t remove the board’s responsibility for decisions. The handbook goes further, arguing that strategic communication belongs inside the governance structure, with access to the board and potentially representation at board level. A board that waits until a crisis to engage communications has already lost some of the ground on which trust is built. So, Shel, have we been using the term “crisis communication” too narrowly? Is it about what you say once a crisis happens, or about how the organization is governed before it happens? Shel Holtz: I think the answer is yes. Communication has to happen during a crisis, but it can’t be the work of a department brought in to clean up afterward. It has to be woven into the organization’s approach to crisis governance. That isn’t solely a communications function. The question of having a “seat at the table”—a term you know I hate—matters if an organization doesn’t take crisis preparedness seriously. Some leaders think, “We’re fine. We don’t have crises. If one happens, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” If you can’t get access to leadership to make the case for crisis governance, then that lack of access is a problem. This is timely for me because I’m helping develop a crisis management plan. We’re calling it that rather than a crisis communication plan. I’m not suggesting you can necessarily manage every aspect of a crisis, but the plan needs a name. We’re developing it by committee, and in this case, that’s a strength. Crisis governance requires active participation from several parts of the organization. Communications can’t wave a document when a crisis hits and announce, “Here’s the plan, everybody.” People need to have helped develop it, understood it, and practiced it. Our committee includes a senior operations leader, our general counsel, our vice president of best practices, and the head of safety. They all have a say in how we approach crisis governance. Horizon scanning falls largely to me in communications, although leadership listens when something comes to us through our monitoring service or another channel. The plan also identifies who should convene on the crisis team based on the nature of the event. You need different expertise for an operational crisis than for a digital security crisis. Those teams need practice to develop the muscle memory to respond well. As our friend Philippe Borremans would say, we’re in an era of polycrisis. You may face several dimensions of one crisis at once, or two unrelated crises that begin to intersect. Adversaries can see what’s happening and take advantage of it. I found an example in our industry that started as a safety issue, became a legal issue, then a financial one, and ultimately put the company out of business. The ability to pivot quickly has to be built into both governance and training. That’s why tabletop exercises matter. Give the team a realistic scenario, put people through their paces, and introduce complications that force them to adapt. Ideally, you would do that four times a year. I don’t know how you build muscle memory if it’s merely an annual exercise people feel obliged to complete. None of this sits solely within a communications department’s purview. Communications informs the communication dimensions, but leadership and the other functions have to prepare together. It cannot begin with a call to communications saying, “We’ve got a crisis. Help.” Neville Hobson: Another point that stood out to me is that communicators should challenge decisions, not merely explain them. The handbook presents senior communicators as sources of stakeholder intelligence and constructive challenge. They can help boards anticipate how decisions will be interpreted, spot emerging reputational risks, and counter groupthink. That goes well beyond creating messages. If the communicator enters the room only after a decision has been made, have we misunderstood the role? Sometimes the most valuable contribution is to say, “You may not want to do this in the first place.” Shel Holtz: That connects to identifying issues before they become crises. I can’t remember the exact wording, but I recall a thought from the IABC Excellence Study: A crisis is what an organization faces when it fails at issues identification and management. If you see an issue coming and act, you may keep it from becoming a full-blown crisis. One definition I use for a crisis is that it can become existential. If it spins out of control, it can affect your ability to do business. The organizations that say, “We’ve never had one; things are going great,” may be particularly unprepared when a crisis arrives. Our plan includes holding statements—not just one, but several for different circumstances—that can be revised and issued quickly. Delay can look evasive. Victims, adversaries, and others may speak first, and that first account can become the version people remember. Then you have to overcome an impression that has already taken hold. Even if all you can say is, “We’ve just learned of this and are looking into it,” you can tell people when to expect an update. If you don’t have more information at that point, say you’re continuing to investigate and give them another update time. Give people a reason to turn to you for reliable information. Neville Hobson: The handbook is worth reading rather than skimming. We’ll link to the PDF on the CIPR website in the show notes. It includes case studies and a toolkit that may be useful in your planning. And I’ll repeat that line: “You cannot communicate your way out of a crisis that you behaved your way into.” Shel Holtz: Self-inflicted crises are among the hardest to handle. In some crises, the organization is a victim too, even if others are harmed along the way. One last thought: Many crisis plans fail to include employees among the stakeholders they need to communicate with. Employees can be your strongest advocates and supporters during a crisis. If you equip them with accurate information, they may be able to answer questions from clients, vendors, partners, consultants, and others they work with. Dan York: Greetings, Shel and Neville, and FIR listeners around the world. It’s Dan York on a glorious autumn day in northwest Vermont. I’m drinking warm apple cider and will soon head to an orchard for apple cider doughnuts. I want to talk about three things happening online. First is an effort announced this past week to close the language gap in AI systems. On September 21, the Gates Foundation announced a five-year commitment with about 60 organizations to make AI services available in more languages. More than 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide, but most online content is in perhaps seven to 10 languages. AI training data and interfaces are concentrated in even fewer. As part of its Goalkeepers report, the Gates Foundation looked at what’s needed for more people to benefit from AI, and language is a major piece of that. My employer, the Internet Society, signed on, as did the Coalition on Digital Impact, or CODI, whose board I sit on. CODI is a nonprofit focused on helping people navigate the internet in their own languages. There’s nothing concrete to report yet, but I think this is an exciting development. I’ll share more in the months ahead, including ways people might get involved. Everyone who chooses to use AI should be able to do so in their own language. My second topic is video. Bluesky now allows uploads of videos up to 10 minutes long. We’ll see whether that encourages more people to make videos there. YouTube also held its Made on YouTube event on September 23 and announced a range of updates. They include ways to customize the feed on your home page, an Ask YouTube tool for recommendations, more editing tools for Shorts, and features for creating vertical microdramas. YouTube is also adding live-streaming capabilities that appear aimed at competing with Twitch, including new ways for hosts to interact. It says live automatic dubbing into multiple languages is coming by 2027. There’s a lot for creators and communicators who work with video to explore. I’ve also been following smart glasses. I’m intrigued by their possibilities but concerned about privacy. Cameras built into glasses can be used to record people inappropriately, including women who have not consented. At the same time, I’ve seen how helpful the technology could be for people with disabilities. Someone who is blind, for example, might use smart glasses to navigate a store and learn what’s on the shelves. That promise comes with difficult questions. You may not know whether the person wearing Ray-Ban smart glasses nearby is livestreaming. Meta has announced more glasses, including a future VR model that sounds closer to goggles than ordinary eyewear. Snap has also announced new augmented-reality Spectacles, with a price around $2,200. Meta has introduced an audio-only option, which may address some concerns about cameras. I’m interested in what these devices can do, but I remain concerned about the privacy implications. Finally, Threads has announced podcast tools intended to help creators share shows, bring listeners back, and start conversations. They include profile banners, episode link cards, transcript and guest cards, new-episode reminders, and podcast insights. I have a Threads account but don’t use it much anymore. Still, if you’re a podcaster who uses Threads, these tools may be worth a look. I’ll send it back to you. I need to buy some apple cider doughnuts. Bye for now. Shel Holtz: Thanks, Dan. I’ve also been following the smart-glasses announcements. Meta’s glasses were around for a while before they developed a stigma, but that stigma has become real. You may remember Google Glass and people being called “Glassholes” for wearing it in public. Something similar seems to be happening with camera-equipped Meta glasses. A version without cameras strikes me as a smart move. I can see the value of glasses that display turn-by-turn directions or information about what I’m looking at. When I travel internationally and encounter a sign in another language, I pull out my phone and use Google Lens to translate it. Having that translation appear in my glasses would be wonderful. There are many useful things AI glasses could do without intruding on other people. As for recording, people already use devices such as Plaud and Fieldy. If you ask permission or let people know you’re recording, I don’t see a major issue. I hope AI glasses develop further, though I’m not inclined to buy a pair from Meta. I’ve also been reading about Meta’s new VR glasses. Initially, I was enthusiastic. I use a Meta Quest 3 mainly to work out with an app called Supernatural. There’s a wonderful story behind Supernatural that we should discuss on the podcast one day. I wanted to know whether my Quest library would work with the new glasses, and apparently it will. I also wondered whether glasses would stay on while I’m jumping around during a workout, and the answer seems to be yes. But then I saw the $1,200 price. People complained that the Quest 3 was expensive at $500. I won’t be rushing out to buy the new device. I’ll see what people say after it’s been out for a while; my Quest 3 works just fine. Great report, Dan. Thank you. Dr. Eleni Nicola is described as an art therapist from Cyprus. She has been quoted more than 30 times in recent months: in Forbes on resetting your home office, Vice on what color to paint your walls to calm an anxious dog, Glamour on crying therapy, and Parade on the right way to retire. Different outlets have called her a clinical psychologist, an art therapist, or a creative wellness expert. The problem is that she doesn’t appear to exist. Press Gazette reported that an image detector rated her profile photo 10 out of 10 for being artificial and her quotes as 100% AI-generated. Her LinkedIn profile was created late last year despite claims of a long career. She isn’t listed by the Art Therapy Credentials Board, which lists thousands of art therapists. Every one of her online profiles links to the same paint-by-numbers kit retailer, DeVincify, where she is presented as an “expert in residence.” This has become a business model. A quote in Forbes brings a link from a high-authority news site. That can improve search rankings, and rankings can drive sales. SEO operators are building fake personas as part of link-building campaigns. When Press Gazette asked DeVincify to verify her, the company’s statement about taking the matter seriously was itself identified as AI-generated. At the time of publication, her profile was still active. This is far bigger than one case. Press Gazette has identified more than a thousand articles across outlets including Mail Online, Metro, The Sun, The Mirror, HuffPost UK, Yahoo, and The Independent that relied partly or entirely on fake experts. More than 600 were traced to a single company. One fictitious psychologist was quoted hundreds of times before anyone established that she wasn’t real. The fakes aren’t limited to sources. Tech sites have pulled articles attributed to finance writers whom Press Gazette couldn’t verify. One claimed a Deloitte career that Deloitte has no record of; another used a headshot that appears to belong to a computer repair technician in the United States. Dan Simon, who runs the journalist-sourcing platform Qwoted, says the platform handles more than 15 violations a day and blocks about 50 prospective clients from registering each day. As he put it, “AI has just poured petrol on the disinformation fire.” The combinations include real agencies with fake experts, real experts with fake expertise, and fake agencies with fake experts. David Higgerson at Reach, publisher of The Mirror, said agencies Reach regularly works with had supplied fake experts without realizing it. They had sourced the quotes in good faith. That makes PR both a victim and a vector. If an agency fails to verify the experts it puts forward, it can launder fakes into the news. These are things we need to catch before publication. A LinkedIn profile is no longer enough to establish that someone is real. Reach has whitelisted hundreds of PR firms, built an AI tool called The Detective to assess whether spokespeople are genuine, and added another layer of verification for people quoted on health or money. Qwoted is introducing video verification. One platform requires responses to be recorded live on camera. Another stopped offering open access because verifying everyone would otherwise have threatened its business. Simple checks still help. Ask for a five-minute call. Ask the person to respond to a specific photo request. If they claim a professional credential, check the relevant registry. One supposed expert stopped responding when asked for a photo. Another was exposed when an agency checked a WhatsApp profile picture and found that it belonged to a man doing SEO for a recipe blog. Neville, what else can an honest communicator do to avoid perpetuating quotes from fake experts? Neville Hobson: I was surprised by how readily fake experts were accepted by major media outlets. I remember a case involving The Telegraph a few months ago. I can’t recall the details, but it published something false, then removed it and apologized. Why wasn’t it checked first? We make the same argument about people using AI-generated content without checking it, but source verification is even more fundamental. I don’t know precisely how every newsroom chooses and verifies the people it quotes. Clearly, though, something is seriously amiss if this is happening on an industrial scale. We may need stronger ways to prove digital identity, comparable in some respects to the checks involved in applying for a passport or, in my case as a school governor, undergoing a criminal-records check. Informal methods aren’t working, and manual checks are difficult to scale. The people creating fakes can scale their efforts. We may have to give up some of the casualness with which we’ve approached verification. Shel Holtz: One detail that struck me was that this involved a paint-by-numbers company. If a company selling paint kits is doing this, who else is? We tend to picture shady crypto operators or other familiar bad actors. But anyone trying to sell something and gain an SEO advantage might be tempted. A journalist’s credibility is at risk when a quoted expert turns out not to exist. News organizations need a process for vetting sources, and they should tell readers what that process is. PR people need one too. If you use a fake expert’s quote to support a press release or offer that person to a reporter, why would that reporter trust you again after discovering the deception? This reminds me of a story we discussed years ago about a purported bank robbery in Texas. A local publication reported it, a larger outlet picked it up, wire services followed, and it spread through news sites, television, and radio. The original story was fake. Each outlet assumed the previous one had checked it. Now the assumption is, “This person has ‘Dr.’ before their name and a LinkedIn profile, so they must be legitimate.” That is woefully inadequate. We need processes to catch these fabrications before we send them into the world. Neville Hobson: That’s the issue. It doesn’t make much sense for every media outlet to build a different verification process. That won’t scale. There may be a role for independent services whose job is to verify that people are who they claim to be. Imagine a PR firm with a strong reputation for providing knowledgeable spokespeople. If just one turns out to be fake, doubts could arise about everyone the firm has supplied. Firms need a way to bolster their own credibility and give journalists and clients confidence in the people they put forward. AI will only make this problem worse. It’s unfortunate, but we’ve reached a point where verification is essential. Shel Holtz: I like the idea of vendors offering verification as a service. It’s also an example of new work arising as AI changes existing jobs. In the meantime, a five-minute video call or a specific photo request can help establish that an individual is real. Those checks may not scale across thousands of sources, but they are steps people can take while better systems are developed. Ultimately, we need scalable solutions. This affects reputation and trust, particularly if people act on advice that was fabricated simply to sell a paint-by-numbers kit. Neville Hobson: Amazing. Shel Holtz: That’s our report for today. We would love to hear your comments. Audio comments are especially welcome—you heard one today. Send us an MP3 of up to three minutes, or record a message directly on the FIR website by clicking the “Send Voicemail” tab on the right side of the page. You can also comment where we post episode announcements, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon, or leave a comment in the show notes at FIRPodcastNetwork.com. We’ll find it, and you can be part of the conversation. Ratings and reviews mean a great deal to us, too. Wherever you get your podcasts, we’d be grateful if you would rate and review the show. We plan to record our next monthly episode on Saturday, October 24. Neville Hobson: That’s right, and we’ll publish it on Monday. Shel Holtz: Monday, October 26. As for shorter midweek episodes, we’ll see how Neville is feeling. If you subscribe to the show, new episodes will appear in your feed as soon as they’re available, without your having to wait for an announcement. And that’s a wrap for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #529: Fake Quotes from Fake Experts Find Their Way Into Top-Tier Media appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.