Emotionally Manipulative PR

This came up on my For You page and is a great example of emotionally manipulative PR. When I first started watching it, of course, it, as a father, immediately strikes a chord. It's the worst nightmare of any parent. A child smuggled to India, your inherent biases and stereotypical assumptions get ignited immediately. Was the child sold to human traffickers?

Slavery, God forbid, to a brothel? But then the video says this. Court orders? Okay. So there's court cases going on here.

So then you understand that, well, we're not talking about kidnapping in the way that most people understand the word. So now as I'm watching it, of course, I assume, well, we're talking now about a parent, the father, taking his daughter without permission of Netherlands authorities back to India. Essentially, it's a custody issue between divorced parents. And sure enough, that's basically what it is. The mother alleges that the father was abusive and violent, though I'm not aware of any police complaints by her against him in The Netherlands to that effect.

Still, it could be true. The father alleges that the mother was abusive, denied him access to the child, and tried to extort money from him. Obviously, I can't have an opinion about the veracity of the allegations on either side, but in 2020, the father did post this on his Twitter account along with other drawings and paintings done by his daughter. Reported the Indian police visited the father shortly after this incident took place and filed a report with Interpol stating that the girl was being well taken care of and was happy. And from as much as any outsider can know, that appears to be true.

The mother's PR campaign has included along with these TikToks and probably Instagram and Facebook and so on, multiple television appearances and appeals to the Dutch royal family. And there is a hint of racism and Islamophobia in her campaign. For example, it's just taken as categorically oppressive to raise a child in India instead of in Europe, and the nature of her complaints against her husband in terms of him being abusive had to do with him restricting her freedom and more or less being controlling, like a stereotypical Muslim according to European understanding. And there's also just a complete dismissal of the authority and legitimacy of Indian court rulings. The point is this is an absolutely one-sided presentation of the story deliberately designed to misrepresent the situation to maximum emotional effect.

And browsing the comment section on her videos, it appears to be quite effective. When you can successfully get people to not question the facts, to not look for the other side of the story, and make people reach a moral conclusion about the story that you're presenting based exclusively on your version, that's good PR. However, there is an inherent problem in using emotion and hyperbole too much in a campaign that's going to drag on for a long time because number one, people get emotionally exhausted, and number two, they have time to research and they can start to identify where maybe you are concealing information, where maybe you are exaggerating, where maybe you are misrepresenting what's going on. A highly emotional and hyperbolic PR campaign can only really work in the short term. So in a case like this, one that is being processed through the court system, which inevitably means that it's going to take a very long time, it's gonna drag on for years, this may not be the best approach.

On the other hand, the father is not engaging in any significant degree of PR activity, which is a mistake on his part. He's probably just depending on the legal process to settle the issue. However, I know from experience that the legal process can unquestionably be swayed by the court of public opinion. Now, again, I'm not taking sides on this issue. I don't know all the facts of the case, so I can't do that.

I'm just commenting on the PR and highlighting that it is PR to help you recognize PR when it comes on your screen.