Fishy Commenters and Net Neutrality
by Matt Stoller, Tue May 30, 2006 at 12:59:27 PM EDT
I have a presentation I give to political campaigns about effectively using the internet. My one rule of thumb is that you shouldn't be dishonest about who you are online. Now, when doing cutting edge 'buzz' marketing of the type sold by firms such as New Media Strategies (to pick one of new marketing firm at random), it can be very tempting to play around in comment threads to generate discussion without disclosing that the commentary comes from paid operatives. It's also probably a bad idea.
I bring this up now because it appears that there is something fishy going on with commenters in the internet freedom fight. These five commenters (paulaner01, oldhats, John Rice, AJ Carey and lessgov) tend to show up on blogs and praise each others' comments promoting the anti-freedom side of the debate, and they have a bizarre focus on this one specific issue. Several bloggers have noticed the use of common talking points among these five.
Now I'm not sure that there's proof here of anything unseemly, and even if there were it's just unethical and stupid rather than genuinely dangerous or illegal. And I doubt that a reputable firm like New Media Strategies would do something like that, or that someone like Mike McCurry would condone it if he knew it was happening. But I want to draw attention to this in case this is a tactic being employed in this fight.
There's nothing wrong with commercial speech, and it's even questionable that financial disclosures are terribly important. But hanging around in comment threads pretending to be a gang of ordinary citizens commenting on an issue while actually operating as a paid lobbying or marketing operation is probably over some unstated ethical line.
Anyway, it's not really worth getting into a lather since even this tactic has been used it hasn't been very effective.
Tags: net neutrality (all tags)
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