Each month more evidence immensely up, suggesting that online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who are not what they seem.
Anonymity of the web provides businesses and Governments golden opportunities to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns, create the impression that large numbers of people demanding or opposing specific policies. This deception is most likely to occur where companies or Governments interests come into conflict with public interests. For example, there are a long history of tobacco companies, which create astroturf groups to fight attempts to regulate them.
After I wrote about online astroturfing in December, I was contacted by a whistleblower. He was part of a commercial team, hired to internet infest forums and comment threads on behalf of serves corporate clients, promote their causes and argue with who opposed them.
Like the other members of the team asked he as disinterested members of the public. Or to be more accurate as a crowd disinterested members of the public: he used 70 personas, both to avoid detection and to create the impression, there was widespread support for his pro-corporate arguments. I will reveal more about what he told me when I am finished with the survey I'm working on.
Now it seems that these operations are more widespread, more sophisticated and more automated than most of us had guessed. E-mails obtained by the political hackers from U.S. cyber-security firm called HBGary Federal propose to a remarkable technological Arsenal inserted drown out the voices of real people.
As the Daily Kos has reported shows the e-mail messages that:
• Companies now use "persona management software", which multiplies efforts each astroturfer, create the impression that there is strong support for what a corporation or Government is trying to do.
• This software creates all online furniture a real person would possess: a name, e-mail accounts, Web pages and social media. In other words, it automatically generates what is similar to authentic profiles, makes it difficult to tell the difference between a virtual robot and a real commentator.
• False accounts can be kept up to date by automatically reposting or create links to content generated elsewhere, reinforcing the impression that its account holders are real and active.
• Human can then be assigned these astroturfers "pre-aged" accounts to create a back story, suggests that they have been busy linking and retweeting months. No one would presume that they came in on stage for the first time a moment ago, with the sole purpose of attacking an article about climate science or argue against new controls on salt in junk food.
• With some clever use of social media, astroturfers can, in vagtselskabs words, "makes it appear as if a persona actually was at a Conference and introduce themselves to key individuals as part of the exercise … There are a number of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to fictitious personas. "
The most disturbing revelation is perhaps this. Us Air Force supply for companies to provide it with persona management software, which will perform the following tasks:
a. create "10 personas per user, full of light, history, supporting details and cyber forms which are technically, culturally and geographically contiguous … Personas should be able to show the origin of almost any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. "
(b). automatically provide its astroturfers with "randomly selected IP addresses through which can get access to the Internet" (an IP address is the number which identifies a person's computer), and these are changed every day "hide the existence of the action". The software should also mix up astroturfers ' web traffic with "traffic from the multitudes of users from outside your organization. This traffic blending modes offers excellent coverage and powerful spanner. "
c. create static "IP addresses" for each persona, enables various astroturfers "look like the same person over time". It should also allow "organisations that frequent the same site of service often too easy to switch IP addresses to resemble common users as opposed to one organization."
Software like this has the potential to destroy the Internet as a forum for constructive debate. It threatens the concept of online democracy. Comment threads about issues with large commercial consequences are already being destroyed by what look like armies of organised ogres – as you can sometimes see on guardian.co.uk.
The Internet is a wonderful gift, but it is also a bonanza for corporate lobbyists, viral marketers and Government spin doctors, which can operate in cyberspace without regulation, accountability, or fear of detection. So let me repeat the question, I have added in previous articles, and which has yet to be answered satisfactory: what should we do to fight these tactics?
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