[LINK] astroturfing

[kim holburn]

On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 2:36 PM, Jan Whitaker <jwhit at melbpc.org.au> wrote:
> At 12:55 PM 9/01/2012, kim holburn wrote:
>>Somehow I am seeing a subtle growing pressure that only corporations
>>have a legitimate voice on the internet.  Like with radio or TV only
>>the "broadcasters" are real, consumers should only consume not answer
>>back.  If they do, they are "astroturfers".
>
> I didn't read it that way. I read it that the legitimate voices are
> being over taken by the fake agenda-biased voices through crowd
> sourcing for money. Just an alert that what you are reading may not
> be a person's true opinion because they have actually thought about
> the thing they are commenting on -- and not just one person doing
> that, but thousands.


Yeah but that's not new at all.  When you look at discussion on many
websites on say: Climate change, or (god forbid) US politics, the
discussions can be anything up to a high percentage of astroturfers.
We had an astroturfer on link a while back I seem to recall.  I keep
getting followed by strange people on twitter who seem to disappear as
twitter's anti-bot bots clean them up.  I read stories of groups like
HBGary who create fake social networking accounts for the US
government.

It's all just e-life as normal really.

The problem they're pointing out seems to be that it's OK if the west
does it but it's a problem when the Chinese or Indians do it?



-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
Ph: +61 2 61402408  M: +61 404072753
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