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Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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--- Begin Message ---
-Caveat Lector-
--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The fake persuaders
Corporations are inventing people to rubbish their opponents on the
internet
George Monbiot
Tuesday May 14, 2002
The Guardian
Persuasion works best when it's invisible. The most effective
marketing worms
its way into our consciousness, leaving intact the perception that we
have
reached our opinions and made our choices independently. As old as
humankind
itself, over the past few years this approach has been refined, with
the help
of the internet, into a technique called "viral marketing". Last
month, the
viruses appear to have murdered their host. One of the world's
foremost
scientific journals was persuaded to do something it had never done
before,
and retract a paper it had published.
While, in the past, companies have created fake citizens' groups to
campaign
in favour of trashing forests or polluting rivers, now they create
fake
citizens. Messages purporting to come from disinterested punters are
planted
on listservers at critical moments, disseminating misleading
information in
the hope of recruiting real people to the cause. Detective work by
the
campaigner Jonathan Matthews and the freelance journalist Andy Rowell
shows
how a PR firm contracted to the biotech company Monsanto appears to
have
played a crucial but invisible role in shaping scientific discourse.
Monsanto knows better than any other corporation the costs of
visibility.
Its clumsy attempts, in 1997, to persuade people that they wanted to
eat GM
food all but destroyed the market for its crops. Determined never to
make
that mistake again, it has engaged the services of a firm which knows
how to
persuade without being seen to persuade. The Bivings Group
specialises in
internet lobbying.
An article on its website, entitled Viral Marketing: How to Infect
the
World, warns that "there are some campaigns where it would be
undesirable or
even disastrous to let the audience know that your organisation is
directly
involved... it simply is not an intelligent PR move. In cases such as
this,
it is important to first 'listen' to what is being said online...
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... Perhaps
the
greatest advantage of viral marketing is that your message is placed
into a
context where it is more likely to be considered seriously." A senior
executive from Monsanto is quoted on the Bivings site thanking the PR
firm
for its "outstanding work".
On November 29 last year, two researchers at the University of
California,
Berkeley published a paper in Nature magazine, which claimed that
native
maize in Mexico had been contaminated, across vast distances, by GM
pollen.
The paper was a disaster for the biotech companies seeking to
persuade
Mexico, Brazil and the European Union to lift their embargos on GM
crops.
Even before publication, the researchers knew their work was
hazardous. One
of them, Ignacio Chapela, was approached by the director of a Mexican
corporation, who first offered him a glittering research post if he
withheld
his paper, then told him that he knew where to find his children. In
the US,
Chapela's opponents have chosen a different form of assassination.
On the day the paper was published, messages started to appear on a
biotechnology listserver used by more than 3,000 scientists, called
AgBioWorld. The first came from a correspondent named "Mary Murphy".
Chapela
is on the board of directors of the Pesticide Action Network, and
therefore,
she claimed, "not exactly what you'd call an unbiased writer". Her
posting
was followed by a message from an "Andura Smetacek", claiming,
falsely, that
Chapela's paper had not been peer-reviewed, that he was "first and
foremost
an activist" and that the research had been published in collusion
with
environmentalists. The next day, another email from "Smetacek"
asked "how
much money does Chapela take in speaking fees, travel reimbursements
and
other donations... for his help in misleading fear-based marketing
campaigns?"
The messages from Murphy and Smetacek stimulated hundreds of others,
some of
which repeated or embellished the accusations they had made. Senior
biotechnologists called for Chapela to be sacked from Berkeley.
AgBioWorld
launched a petition pointing to the paper's "fundamental flaws".
Complete Article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,715159,00.html
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DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
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