[iwar] [fc:The.Fake.Persuaders]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-06-24 08:07:51


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Subject: [iwar] [fc:The.Fake.Persuaders]
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<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,715159,00.html">http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,715159,00.html>

The Fake Persuaders

George Monbiot
Tuesday May 14, 2002
The Guardian 

Corporations are inventing people to rubbish their opponents on the internet 

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". 

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. 


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