The fastest way to do that, he said, is “to pull the ad and do another one.”

In this case, however, removing the ad did not make the problem go away  far from it. Days later, on May 28, Ms. Malkin published a syndicated column praising Dunkin’ Donuts for removing the ad and reiterating the contention that Ms. Ray “posed for one of the company’s ads in what appeared to be a black-and-white keffiyeh.” She added, “The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad.” It drew hundreds of comments on her blog and elsewhere.

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From there, a backlash to the backlash started to take hold.

An item about the controversy had more than 2,300 votes and 830 comments on Digg, a news aggregation site. A YouTube video, “Rachael Ray Is a Terrorist,” poked fun at the situation, with the narrator saying, “Yes, because when I look at Rachael Ray I think 9/11.” That video drew more than 2,300 comments, and a related story on The Huffington Post had more than 1,200 comments.

“Often the counterstory can become bigger than the original story,” said Adam Selig, the chief executive of Visible Technologies, which helps companies handle their reputations online. “That’s something you have to be very careful about in social media.”

The removal of ads in response to objections is nothing new. Last year, several suicide-themed ads from General Motors, Washington Mutual and Volkswagen were removed after objections from suicide-prevention groups, and animal rights groups have campaigned against certain “Got Milk?” spots and others.

But for all the headache, has anyone’s opinion about the companies in question really been influenced?

“There are scandals that are worth responding to and there are scandals that are worth ignoring, and I think the Internet amplifies these voices,” said Eric Hirshberg, the president and chief creative officer of Deutsch L.A., which created the G.M. spot (which was returned to television after some revision). “But this is no different than the retired grandmother who used to write a handwritten letter because she was offended by a video game ad intended for 17-year-olds.”