How the Church of Scientology fought the Internet — and why it lost
Originally published in The Kernel, September 20, 2015.
The Church of Scientology would like you to know that, as of this writing, its official Facebook page has 329,903 likes. We’ll return to that number later, but it might be a heartening one for the church, which has recently grappled with less-friendly numbers, such as the 5.5 million people who watched Alex Gibney’s scathing documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which premiered on HBO in March. (The film, which portrayed declining membership and abusive practices at the highest levels of the church, recently won three Emmy awards, including for best documentary, and Gibney’s spoken of a sequel.) Or the more than 1 million YouTube viewers who’ve seen the Saturday Night Live sketch below — less a parody than a cover version of a Scientology recruitment video, touting “Neurotology.”
In response to Going Clear, its most prominent public-relations challenge in years, Scientology went on the offensive. It took out full-page ads in the New York Times and Los Angeles…
