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Aloha all A.L. Pacher
Source: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0514-03.htm
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Published on Tuesday, May 14, 2002 in the Guardian of London
The Fake Persuaders
Corporations are Inventing People to Rubbish Their Opponents on the Internet
by George Monbiot
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 favor 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 specializes 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 organization 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 embargoes 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 e-mail 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 satirizing the
opponents of biotech, sent by a "Mary Murphy" 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 Center For
Food and Agricultural Research". The center 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
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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