[THS] George Monbiot: The Real Threat to Internet Democracy

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27233.htm

These Astroturf Libertarians are the Real Threat to Internet Democracy

As I see in threads on my articles, the online sabotaging of intelligent debate seems
organised. We must fight to save this precious gift

By George Monbiot

January 10, 2011 "The Guardian" -- They are the online equivalent of enclosure riots:
the rick-burning, fence-toppling protests by English peasants losing their rights to the
land. When MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Amazon tried to shut WikiLeaks out of the
cyber-commons, an army of hackers responded by trying to smash their way into
these great estates and pull down their fences. In the WikiLeaks punch-up the
commoners appear to have the upper hand. But it's just one battle. There's a wider
cyberwar being fought, of which you hear much less. And in most cases the
landlords, with the help of a mercenary army, are winning.

I'm not talking here about threats to net neutrality and the danger of a two-tier
internet developing, though these are real. I'm talking about the daily attempts to
control and influence content in the interests of the state and corporations: attempts
in which money talks.

The weapon used by both state and corporate players is a technique known as
astroturfing. An astroturf campaign is one that mimics spontaneous grassroots
mobilisations but which has in reality been organised. Anyone writing a comment
piece in Mandarin critical of the Chinese government, for instance, is likely to be
bombarded with abuse by people purporting to be ordinary citizens, upset by the
slurs against their country.

But many of them aren't upset: they are members of the 50 Cent Party, so-called
because one Chinese government agency pays five mao (half a yuan) for every post
its tame commenters write. Teams of these sock-puppets are hired by party leaders
to drown out critical voices and derail intelligent debates.

I first came across online astroturfing in 2002, when the investigators Andy Rowell
and Jonathan Matthews looked into a series of comments made by two people calling
themselves Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek. They had launched ferocious
attacks, across several internet forums, against a scientist whose research suggested
that Mexican corn had been widely contaminated by GM pollen.

Rowell and Matthews found that one of the messages Mary Murphy had sent came
from a domain owned by the Bivings Group, a PR company specialising in internet
lobbying. An article on the Bivings website explained that "there are some campaigns
where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your
organisation is directly involved 
 Message boards, chat rooms, and listservs are a
great way to anonymously monitor what is being said. Once you are plugged into this
world, it is possible to make postings to these outlets that present your position as an
uninvolved third party."

The Bivings site also quoted a senior executive from the biotech corporation
Monsanto, thanking the PR firm for its "outstanding work". When a Bivings executive
was challenged by Newsnight, he admitted that the "Mary Murphy" email was sent
by someone "working for Bivings" or "clients using our services". Rowell and
Matthews then discovered that the IP address on Andura Smetacek's messages was
assigned to Monsanto's headquarters in St Louis, Missouri. There's a nice twist to this
story. AstroTurf TM – real fake grass – was developed and patented by Monsanto.

Reading comment threads on the Guardian's sites and elsewhere on the web, two
patterns jump out at me. The first is that discussions of issues in which there's little
money at stake tend to be a lot more civilised than debates about issues where
companies stand to lose or gain billions: such as climate change, public health and
corporate tax avoidance. These are often characterised by amazing levels of abuse
and disruption.

Articles about the environment are hit harder by such tactics than any others. I love
debate, and I often wade into the threads beneath my columns. But it's a depressing
experience, as instead of contesting the issues I raise, many of those who disagree
bombard me with infantile abuse, or just keep repeating a fiction, however often you
discredit it. This ensures that an intelligent discussion is almost impossible – which
appears to be the point.

The second pattern is the strong association between this tactic and a certain set of
views: pro-corporate, anti-tax, anti-regulation. Both traditional conservatives and
traditional progressives tend to be more willing to discuss an issue than these
rightwing libertarians, many of whom seek to shut down debate.

So what's going on? I'm not suggesting that most of the people trying to derail these
discussions are paid to do so, though I would be surprised if none were. I'm
suggesting that some of the efforts to prevent intelligence from blooming seem to be
organised, and that neither website hosts nor other commenters know how to
respond.

For his film (Astro)Turf Wars, Taki Oldham secretly recorded a training session
organised by a rightwing libertarian group called American Majority. The trainer,
Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to "manipulate the
medium". This is what he told them: "Here's what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in
'Liberal books'. I go through and I say 'one star, one star, one star'. The flipside is
you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them
five stars 
 This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These
are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in 'Movies on healthcare', I
don't want Michael Moore's to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about
30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click 
 If there's a place to comment, a place
to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That's how you control the
online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance."



Over 75% of the funding for American Majority comes from the Sam Adams Alliance.
In 2008, the year in which American Majority was founded, 88% of the alliance's
money came from a single donation, of $3.7m. A group that trains rightwing
libertarians to distort online democratic processes was, in other words, set up with
funding from a person or company with a very large wallet.

The internet is a remarkable gift, which has granted us one of the greatest
democratic opportunities since universal suffrage. We're in danger of losing this
global commons as it comes under assault from an army of trolls and flacks, many of
them covertly organised or trained. The question for all of us – the Guardian, other
websites, and everyone who benefits from this resource – is what we intend to do
about it. It's time we fought back and reclaimed the internet for what it does best:
exploring issues, testing ideas, opening the debate.