Twitter! Facebook! Discussion boards! All of these wonderful social media tools now enable the voice of the individual to be heard, facilitate political organization, foster the people’s revolution, and fight the Power of the Man. Oh brave new world, that has such communication in it! Blog after blog attributes the Arab Spring to new technology as through the Singularity, that anticipated moment of nerd rapture, were only a few upgrades away.

And perhaps that is one side of the story. But you need to know the other side as well. Ani Difranco said, “Any tool is a weapon if you hold it right.” And the governments of the world, those men (and a few women) who have their hands clenched on the mice of power all share a common desire not to let those mice get loose. So they’re using those same tools as well, because on the internet – as the old New Yorker cartoon has it – nobody knows you’re a dog. Or a mole. Or anything really.

We’ll start with Facebook, and link to a memorable piece from The Guardian‘s report on the SXSW computer conference that illustrates that point clearly:

Not long ago, according to the new-media guru Clay Shirky, the Sudanese government set up a Facebook page calling for a protest against the Sudanese government, naming a specific time and place – then simply arrested those who showed up. It was proof, Shirky argues, that social media can’t be revolutionary on its own. “The reason that worked is that nobody knew anybody else,” he says. “They thought Facebook itself was trustworthy.”

This is perilously close to The Onion story this week that The CIA’s invention of Facebook has saved the government millions of dollars. You might think that’s just satire, and humour, but there are a few shards of truthiness clinging to it. $27 million of Facebook’s venture capital has come from people on the board of In-Q-Tel, a data mining company affiliated with the CIA. So being cautious about your status, and which “friends” you “like” may just be like looking both ways before you step on the street.

And your word for the week is astroturfing. Astroturfing is creating a fake grassroots movement, and George Monbiot has a fine explanation of it here.

Every month more evidence piles up, suggesting that online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren’t what they seem to be. The anonymity of the web gives companies and governments golden opportunities to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns, which 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.

To governments and companies, this is just another way of spending their advertising budget, or their military budget. Ilan Shturman, who is responsible for creating Israeli teams of astroturfers, is clear about it,

Israel’s foreign ministry is reported to be establishing a special undercover team of paid workers whose job it will be to surf the internet 24 hours a day spreading positive news about Israel. Internet-savvy Israeli youngsters, mainly recent graduates and demobilised soldiers with language skills, are being recruited to pose as ordinary surfers while they provide the government’s line on the Middle East conflict.

“To all intents and purposes the internet is a theatre in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we must be active in that theatre, otherwise we will lose,” said Ilan Shturman….

A number of the blogs I read regularly have either ended reader comments altogether, or started requiring real names and verified emails before readers can post online. Endless trolls, repetitious arguments that have been heard too many times before, and vituperative personal attacks have made that necessary. And of course, if your side is doing that to me, my side has to do that to you as well in self defence, and the real conversations that this board, for example, has often featured become an increasingly imperiled species.

One might argue that this is a chance to engage people with opposing views, and that as the fine Talmudic saying goes, “The dispute of scholars increases wisdom.” But as Upton Sinclair noted, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” And the people posting astroturf are being paid to offer one-sided stories. That is, if they are real people at all. The Guardian reported last week:

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media using fake online personas designed to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda. A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with the US Central Command (Centcom) to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities at once…. The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as “sock puppets” – could encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.

Some social media networks (Reddit is a personal favourite) allow readers to vote comments and response threads up or down. So a troll who ventured onto the Reddit LGBT board to make homophobic comments, for example, would be down-voted and have their comment sink into oblivion, or not appear at all. One can choose for comments with negative net votes to be invisible. Reddiquette dictates that you don’t down-vote comments with which you disagree, but only ones that don’t facilitate insight.

All of this makes it clear we’re not in Kansas anymore, but instead in a curious inversion of the Wizard of Oz… where what appears to be an ordinary man arguing politics may be in fact be a computer wizard in a control room manipulating sock-puppets. Caveat lector!


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