I
Ilena Rose
Guest
http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,715159,00.html
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.
Advertiser links World Vision - Child Charity Sponsor a
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month, you can make a difference in the life...
children.org 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".
There do appear to be methodological problems with the
research Chapela and his colleague David Quist had
published, but this is hardly unprecedented in a scientific
journal. All science is, and should be, subject to challenge
and disproof. But in this case the pressure on Nature was so
severe that its editor did something unparalleled in its 133-
year history: last month he published, alongside two papers
challenging Quist and Chapela's, a retraction in which he
wrote that their research should never have been published.
So the campaign against the researchers was extraordinarily
successful; but who precisely started it? Who are "Mary
Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek"?
Both claim to be ordinary citizens, without any corporate
links. The Bivings Group says it has "no knowledge of them".
"Mary Murphy" uses a hotmail account for posting messages to
AgBioWorld. But a message satirising the opponents of
biotech, sent by "Mary Murphy" from the same hotmail account
to another server two years ago, contains the identification
bw6.bivwood.com. Bivwood.com is the property of Bivings
Woodell, which is part of the Bivings Group.
When I wrote to her to ask whether she was employed by
Bivings and whether Mary Murphy was her real name, she
replied that she had "no ties to industry". But she
refused to answer my questions on the grounds that "I can
see by your articles that you made your mind up long ago
about biotech". The interesting thing about this response
is that my message to her did not mention biotechnology. I
told her only that I was researching an article about
internet lobbying.
Smetacek has, on different occasions, given her address as
"London" and "New York". But the electoral rolls, telephone
directories and credit card records in both London and the
entire US reveal no "Andura Smetacek". Her name appears only
on AgBioWorld and a few other listservers, on which she has
posted scores of messages falsely accusing groups such as
Greenpeace of terrorism. My letters to her have elicited no
response. But a clue to her possible identity is suggested
by her constant promotion of "the Centre For Food and
Agricultural Research". The centre appears not to exist,
except as a website, which repeatedly accuses greens of
plotting violence. Cffar.org is registered to someone called
Manuel Theodorov. Manuel Theodorov is the "director of
associations" at Bivings Woodell.
Even the website on which the campaign against the paper in
Nature was launched has attracted suspicion. Its moderator,
the biotech enthusiast Professor CS Prakash, claims to have
no connection to the Bivings Group. But when Jonathan
Matthews was searching the site's archives he received the
following error message: "can't connect to MySQL server on
apollo.bivings.com". Apollo.bivings.com is the main server
of the Bivings Group.
"Sometimes," Bivings boasts, "we win awards. Sometimes only
the client knows the precise role we played." Sometimes, in
other words, real people have no idea that they are being
managed by fake ones.
· www.monbiot.com
~~~~~~
For related articles, please visit:
www.humanticsfoundation.com/DisinfoAgents.htm#articles
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.
Advertiser links World Vision - Child Charity Sponsor a
child today. World Vision, driven by faith, is...
worldvision.org
We Are The Future - Child Charities Raising funds to benefit
boys and girls in war-torn cities....
wearethefuture.com
Children International - Sponsor a Child For only $18 a
month, you can make a difference in the life...
children.org 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".
There do appear to be methodological problems with the
research Chapela and his colleague David Quist had
published, but this is hardly unprecedented in a scientific
journal. All science is, and should be, subject to challenge
and disproof. But in this case the pressure on Nature was so
severe that its editor did something unparalleled in its 133-
year history: last month he published, alongside two papers
challenging Quist and Chapela's, a retraction in which he
wrote that their research should never have been published.
So the campaign against the researchers was extraordinarily
successful; but who precisely started it? Who are "Mary
Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek"?
Both claim to be ordinary citizens, without any corporate
links. The Bivings Group says it has "no knowledge of them".
"Mary Murphy" uses a hotmail account for posting messages to
AgBioWorld. But a message satirising the opponents of
biotech, sent by "Mary Murphy" from the same hotmail account
to another server two years ago, contains the identification
bw6.bivwood.com. Bivwood.com is the property of Bivings
Woodell, which is part of the Bivings Group.
When I wrote to her to ask whether she was employed by
Bivings and whether Mary Murphy was her real name, she
replied that she had "no ties to industry". But she
refused to answer my questions on the grounds that "I can
see by your articles that you made your mind up long ago
about biotech". The interesting thing about this response
is that my message to her did not mention biotechnology. I
told her only that I was researching an article about
internet lobbying.
Smetacek has, on different occasions, given her address as
"London" and "New York". But the electoral rolls, telephone
directories and credit card records in both London and the
entire US reveal no "Andura Smetacek". Her name appears only
on AgBioWorld and a few other listservers, on which she has
posted scores of messages falsely accusing groups such as
Greenpeace of terrorism. My letters to her have elicited no
response. But a clue to her possible identity is suggested
by her constant promotion of "the Centre For Food and
Agricultural Research". The centre appears not to exist,
except as a website, which repeatedly accuses greens of
plotting violence. Cffar.org is registered to someone called
Manuel Theodorov. Manuel Theodorov is the "director of
associations" at Bivings Woodell.
Even the website on which the campaign against the paper in
Nature was launched has attracted suspicion. Its moderator,
the biotech enthusiast Professor CS Prakash, claims to have
no connection to the Bivings Group. But when Jonathan
Matthews was searching the site's archives he received the
following error message: "can't connect to MySQL server on
apollo.bivings.com". Apollo.bivings.com is the main server
of the Bivings Group.
"Sometimes," Bivings boasts, "we win awards. Sometimes only
the client knows the precise role we played." Sometimes, in
other words, real people have no idea that they are being
managed by fake ones.
· www.monbiot.com
~~~~~~
For related articles, please visit:
www.humanticsfoundation.com/DisinfoAgents.htm#articles