Web "astroturfing" and the dangers of anonymity

Last week, at the height of the panic surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan (the panic has passed, the danger hasn't), I wrote a post about the dangers of blind reliance on "expert" analysis. I think that issues with verifying the authenticity of sources and information are extremely difficult to resolve on the internet, and that most internet users probably overestimate the journalistic integrity of the sources they read most often.

This overestimation can be extremely dangerous, and it leaves internet users highly vulnerable to manipulation by people or groups with agendas. As can typically be expected, where a vulnerability exists, a predator enters. The Guardian's George Monbiot writes (emphasis mine):

Every month more evidence piles up, suggesting that online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren't what they seem.

The anonymity of the web gives companies and governments golden opportunities to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns that create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies. This deception is most likely to occur where the interests of companies or governments come into conflict with the interests of the public. For example, there's a long history of tobacco companies creating 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 employed to infest internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients, promoting their causes and arguing with anyone who opposed them.

Like the other members of the team, he posed as a disinterested member of the public. Or, to be more accurate, as a crowd of 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'll reveal more about what he told me when I've finished the investigation I'm working on.

It now seems that these operations are more widespread, more sophisticated and more automated than most of us had guessed. Emails obtained by political hackers from a US cyber-security firm called HBGary Federal suggest that a remarkable technological armoury is being deployed to drown out the voices of real people.

This is not good. Operations like this can and do go just about anywhere--from posting overly beneficial product reviews on e-commerce sites to infiltrating message boards to dominating the "Comments" sections of influential blogs, there are literally hundreds of ways in which corporations and agencies can take advantage of our blind faith in the wisdom of internet crowds.

The power of the internet's crowdsourcing capabilities is immense, but it is also easily perverted and compromised. This then threatens to take us back to square one, where the only opinions we can trust are those that are closest to us, which can be easily verified. That's not a good place to end up. Therefore it's ultimately on us as consumers of internet content to verify, verify, and verify some more. It's too bad, but it's where we are.

[Guardian]