The Astroturf Rebellion

Over the past few weeks I’ve been wondering about counters, online reviews, and cheating – which is to say, I’ve been wondering how many bloggers click on their own blog multiple times each day in order to make their counters rise, how many teachers (and other professionals) go onto online rating sites to improve their general rating, how many people leave positive reviews about books they’ve written or restaurants they own, or other businesses they have an interest in, and whether or not this is gaming the system. Certainly there’s no law against such tactics, anymore than there would be for getting all of your friends and relatives to send in letters of support for you on a job or praise for your performance in a play, for example. But it’s hard to deny that this is using a comments system (or even an entire feedback and rating site) for your own purposes; it’s even harder to deny that people are already doing this…

Some years ago word leaked out that the Chinese national government was making use of paid Internet operatives to sing the praises of its agencies and policies – and shout down anyone who was in any way critical of their government. The story goes that the People’s Ministry of Culture was paying a small sum for each review, comment or blog post that served one of these two purposes; it was nicknamed the “Fifty-Cent Party” because the fee for doing so was said to be 50 Mao, or half a Yuan (the standard unit of Chinese currency). The question of just how many such operatives actually exist remains in dispute, but interestingly enough, so does the question of just how aggressive these people actually are, and just how wrong such a campaign would actually be. On one level, this tactic isn’t that different from communities in the US employing boosters to promote their civic virtues; it’s only if they’re trying to mislead people about true conditions or drown out voices of dissent that things get ugly. And before you tell me that such things could never happen in a culture with freedom of speech and freedom of the press, I regret to inform you that apparently they already are…

A story reported last week in The Daily Kos claims that some of our home-grown Tea Party groups have been recruiting teams of “activists” to go onto Amazon and other sites and issue hundreds of negative reviews of books they consider to be excessively “Liberal” (whatever that might mean nowadays), regardless of whether said volunteers had actually read the books or not. The same article claims that this tactic is being used to promote anything by any of the Tea Party’s favorite commentators, regardless of quality (or indeed, sanity) – which may explain why certain right-wing authors have been selling so well over the past few years. The Daily Kos may not be the most moderate (or Moderate) news source going, but their information appears to check out; a much bigger question from where I’m sitting is whether this really compares to the Chinese example – and if such tactics are or should be illegal in the first place…

This isn’t an ethics post, mostly because there’s no real grey area here to discuss. Issuing fraudulent reviews (of anything, for any reason) is morally indefensible, and if this is true it plays up the moral bankruptcy of people who would claim to be social conservatives in order to further their own wealth and power. From a business standpoint, however, I have to wonder if a retailer like Amazon should attempt to restrict such reviews, or how they could possibly do so if they wanted to. How to you prove which reviews are fraudulent (such as ones where the “reviewer” has never read the book and is only criticizing it to forward a political agenda), and how do you prevent users from making reviews of this type? Can you even try to do so without violating your customers’ right to free speech? How about if you’re the publisher or publicity agent of one of the authors being slandered in this fashion? Do you have a responsibility to help them fight off such attacks, or would you be better off staying out of it?

The practice is called “astroturfing” in reference to the artificial grass used for some sports stadia; the fake reviews and so on are said to be “artificial grass roots” movements, created for the occasion. The degree to which such things are really happening, in the US or overseas, will probably always remain in dispute, but it’s worth remembering the next time you check out the online ratings of a product, person, movement, event or idea: you can’t believe everything you read – especially on the Internet…