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Starting in 2013, SeaWorld faced a public relations disaster with the release of the documentary titled Blackfish that accused the company of mistreatment of its orcas. SeaWorld attempted to respond and rebuild its credibility, but activist group ‘People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ (PETA) doubled down on the corporation through its rhetorical shock tactics, deepening the organization’s woes. The PETA/SeaWorld controversy does more than provide another example of poor corporate public relations decision-making made in light of an activist group’s savvy use of digital technology. We argue that the case helps explain how digital technologies fundamentally change activism, whereby activists can use rhetorical fracturing, or quickly using digital media to puncture a target’s narrative, to create messages that challenge an opponent’s legitimacy to cultivate public opinion, thereby pressuring corporate policy change. Recent activism scholarship points out how digital media transforms organizational-activist relationships in profound ways, but this essay contributes to a gap in public relations scholarship by showing how strategic, message-level digital activism helps contribute to broad societal change. Indeed, given that SeaWorld’s stock was down nearly 40 percent in 2015 and ‘is about 50% below its all-time high’, its profits were down 84 percent in 2015, and attendance has fallen more than 7 percent at its parks, the case illustrates how digital activist campaigns help reshape societal understanding of a controversial issue such as using animals for entertainment.

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Given the significant and often negative impacts of sport mega-events on host nations, including high costs and lingering environmental challenges, many event organizers, such as the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), began implementing corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives to generate positive effects while lessening negative perceptions. Despite the growing body of literature examining the practice of sport CSR, research on how global governing sport agencies implement and adapt these programs to reflect the culture of the host is lacking. This study begins to address this gap by exploring how FIFA tailored its CSR initiatives for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and 2014 event in Brazil. Engaging in CSR is already a daunting task. For FIFA, this challenge was compounded because of the host nations' complex social, political, and economic concerns, along with skepticism surrounding FIFA's efforts because of its history of corruption, which recently culminated in an organizational scandal that prompted arrests of high-ranking officials and temporary banishment of its former president. To better investigate CSR using a critical lens, we draw from interdisciplinary research and employ a multi-case study approach to analyze FIFA's CSR initiatives, arguing that these efforts largely failed to reflect cultural considerations, providing little benefit to Brazilians and South Africans. In doing so, we build upon Zaharna's in-awareness approach to public relations by merging it with critical CSR research, demonstrating the need for sponsoring organizations to follow an in-awareness approach when practicing international CSR while also adopting

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