The Top 5 Biggest Corporate PR Disasters of 2018

Major companies made plenty of public-relations blunders in 2018, including Lockheed Martin’s campaign that unwittingly produced images documenting how the arms contractor’s products are used to kill children, as well as Under Armour’s admission that it had paid for staff trips to strip clubs. With no shortage of incidents to choose from, here are my top five corporate fiascos:

1. Facebook’s silence about its data breach: The social media giant reportedly chose to stay silent even though it had known for three years that Cambridge Analytica — the consulting firm hired by President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign — improperly accessed information on millions of people. Since then, the company has racked up misstep after misstep, from the failure to issue an immediate statement from Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg when Facebook finally admitted what happened to hiring a shady opposition research firm to investigate its critics. On Tuesday, Facebook was the subject of more bad news, as the New York Times reported that it shared even more user data with outside companies than previously acknowledged.