Slashdot Mirror
LinuxToday Astroturfing Explained
cigarky sent us Paul Ferris' account (fwiw, Paul is a good guy) of the LinuxToday astroturfing that we mentioned a few weeks ago. Much more explanation about how Executive Editor Kevin Reichard was posting numerous comments under numerous aliases on the LT forums. Even more scary is the editorial war regarding linking outside content. My opinion is that LT's only value was the outside content they linked: until Dave and later Paul left, they were the best url for finding comprehensive Linux news. A real eye-opening piece about "Journalism" and Internet.com. (Note: LT and Internet.com are sorta competitors, although I never really cared much. My opinions are probably skewed somehow because of that ;))
Unfortunatly the person who told the author that this happens all the time was extremly correct, and just not on internet sources.
A story to illistrate from what I know. When I worked for a local paper they used to run what was called a "readers choice" award. The idea being that people would vote on what places around town they liked the best. categories included best place to eat, best pizza etc. I had a friend who worked for a regional pizza chain. He told me that he had been directed by the boss, along with several other employees to fill out these forms to be sent in. I , of course, reported what I had heard to the editor of that section of the paper and she said that she would look into it.
When I spoke to her a week later she told me that yes that she had found massive evidence of ballet fraud. Random samplings of ballets with this store on them had turned up the people who had their name on the ballot had not filled them out. She said that she had personally seen over 100 ballots filled out with the same pen and handwriting. I felt vidicated. Then the awards were anounced. The number one spot was that pizza chain! I spoke to the editor and asked how this could be, she told me that it was a marketting decision from above. Basically they bought so much ad revenue they were given that spot.
This just illistrates the porblems that any news repoting agency faces. If you moderate you are going to slant the moderation to the bias of the viewer, what I consider a troll you may consider a witty comment. The first time you remove a post for any reason the news starts to slant, even if the post was trash pure and simple. It is a slippery slope that once started down cannot be stopped.
The same goes for advertising, you may think that they are the worst people in the world but you have to generate ad revenue and therefore accept their ads. Some ad revenue is turned away but once accepted it does flavor the news that it supports.. A final fact about this from my expereinces at the local paper. We where told that out of our 100 million dollar revenue from the previous year 11 million had come from news paper sales, the rest had come from advertising. In the four story building I worked in one third of one floor was for the news department, the rest of the building was for the advertising departments. Journalism has alwasy been subjugated to market forces. It's almost a good sign that online journalism has started to feel these effects themselves. It is a sign that online news is growing up.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
Although this still is /. , I find it odd that there isn't more harsh criticism for this apparent black eye for Linux journalism.
If this was say "Windows Today" magazine, we'd have a 1,000 post article of how magazine's based on closed-source stuff is evil. Rah! Rah! Linux journalism isn't like this, we don't have to be...we're superior! Yet no one seems to care about this and is willing to sweep it under the proverbial rug.
People flaunt their ethics("I would never use a M$ OS or work for a company that does) and morals(I refuse to write anything but open-source code), but I wonder, what was wrong with this guy that he just didn't leave. Doing something unethical as this should qualify as a comprimization of ethics. If things were as bad as he said they were, then to me it's time to cash out my options and jump ship.
There are only two journalistic sites on the web that charge a fee and make money - The Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports. Both are generally considered to have high journalistic standards. Both avoid publishing press releases. Both make money. This should tell you something.
There is a petition going around. The idea is to try and put some pressure on the LT staff to put out some answers. To date it's had little effect. We've had a very hard time getting the normal outlets to take notice of us.
Many of them feel that this story should die.
Other think that it's not really a story, that it's not important.
And still others seem to think that the community needs to be "protected."
It's linked at the bottom of Paul's article, but I'll include it here too.
LT Petition
Myddrin
I was once astroturfed by LinuxGram.
. shtml
2 -2001Feb8.html
2 -08-002-20-NW-SS
http://www.slashdot.org/articles/01/05/01/1936218
I was saying that LinuxGram sometimes posts a lot of Crap. Specifically an interview with Volker Wiegand by Maureen OGara where she took everything he said out of context and misquoted him in several places. I cant find the story on their site right now. But here is a summary from fairfax it.
http://it.mycareer.com.au/breaking/20010208/A2055
Here is a link with Volker Wiegands responce where he says that Maureen OGara deliberately misquoted him. http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-0
When I posted the comment on Slashdot, two people created new Slashdot logins and replied. One was called SuSE_Rulez and the other was called ingenuity7. You can tell they were knew logins because they hadnt posted before or since. And Slashdot gives the UID numbers out consecutively and I checked to see what slashdot UID I would get on that day and it came right after theirs. Also look how ingenuity7 refers to LinuxGram as CSN which is its less well known parent company. To me he seems to know a lot more than normal people do about LinuxGram.
Of course, when I was astroturfed by LinuxGram I was hardly surprised but this story about LinuxToday is disapointing. Other journalists have replied to my face if I disagreed with them and thats the way it should be done.
For me to get out and add a bit to this story. I worked as a freelance writer for internet.com over a period of a few months. I stuck to simple administrivial details and the occasional story about programming. For the most part my articles were not that great but they were of technical nature.
I worked for Kevin directly. I also submitted invoices to him directly as well.
As time went on, communications between Kevin and I diminished slowly. I did not mind because that was during the summer of 2000 and a lot was happening. I wrote it off as he was busy.
Finally, towards the end of last summer, I was beginning to get worried, I had submitted 2 rather large articles which they had in their possession but had done nothing with. It worried me since technically the material was mine until they decided to print it and (for some reason) I feared they were never going to do anything with it.
As time went on, I tried to make contact again and again (a few times I used some choice words I probably should not have). Finally I contacted Kevin's boss about the issue after waiting almost 2 months.
I was fired the next day. Interestingly, I was only ever harsh with Kevin, so I sort of did not understand why I was fired since I had been pretty professional in the email to his boss. Needless to say my confidence dropped thru the floor and I sort of walked away from the whole issue - citing myself as being a luser.
It was shortly after that I was offered work in books with a well respected publisher (whom I still work for every now and again). I began to feel a little better about my writing, but was still confused as to why I had been let go from internet.com.
Around that time I also noticed that the internet.com kludge was getting worse, external sites were not being linked to, forums were obviously being heavily edited/censored - basically it was going down the crapper. Also many internet.com stories were changing from technical to more inflamatory (go figure).
In the end, a little bird told me my firing had been arranged. I no longer fit the content model of internet.com. Most likely my contract would have been discontinued anyway whether I had lobbed a few balls at internet.com or not.
I had asked Kevin not too speak of what happened, I also asked if he would be a reference for me, which he never responded to. I wanted not to have it come up again because my charachter/credibility could possibly come under fire. In retrospect after working on several books and writing for other sites I think it is quite possible that I was not the one with the credibility/professionalism issues.
I still do not speak to Kevin and frankly I do not ever want to see/hear anything about him again unless it concerns his resignation from internet.com and perhaps the field in general.
I would like to say there are still many good editors and writers at internet.com, I do not know how deep seeded this problem is within their management, but I suspect it starts and ends with Kevin.
Thought folks might like that little addition.
---
I've worked with the people from Internet.com (I worked at the datacenter they used to host their servers). They are the most obnoxious and overall CRAPPY people you could ever meet. Not only do they think they are the God's of the Internet, they also feel that rules don't apply to them. (This symptom seemed to be company wide, from the pions up to the CTO/VP).
I cannot count the number of times in which they would try to break the rules and claim they weren't informed of these rules. Nothing applied to them. They would walk into the monitoring room (which customers aren't allowed) and act like they lived there, picking up phones and making long distance calls. They were asked EVERYDAY to not do that and when we had site security escort them out, they called one of our VP's and threatened to not buy their $1 million worth of Sun boxes this month.
It was completely ridiculous. They are not "upright business people." They are downright scum. This article only confirms my belief in their ethical practices as a business and as a news agency.
Sorry, forgot to include the link
Eric S. Raymond: Remember Astroturfing? Now, Microsoft wraps itself in the flag
Funny thing is, that article is on Linux Today...
http://www.club977.com/ - The 80's Channel!
Your source for commercial free 80's music!
been suspicious of these so called 'message boards' on news web sites. Seems simple enough, post a news article that doesn't push the particular publishers 'agenda', and then influence public opinion by letting the 'common people' speak out about it.
I also have to wonder about the validity of these emails and message board posts that show up on shows like CNN's 'talkback live' or 'news site'. Not trying to sound like a conspiracy nut, but we know the media massages news to their liking, how are we to know that they dont try to portray joe six-pack as being in favor or against said subject?
this is why it sends shivers up my spine when people talk about 'your one source for news' etc etc...
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
I much prefer Linux Weekly New's Daily Page for finding out what's going on in the linux world and their weekly summaries for commentary.
If I want to hear what people are saying about a story, Slashdot is much more useful.
I still check LinuxToday every other day or so to see what stories fell through the cracks at LWN.
I was a big fan of LinuxToday for a few years now, because it was a smaller weblog with far less trolls than our beloved /. (even with their astroturfing) They do moderate the posts, though, which may help account for that. But it always struck me as strange that a bunch of blatantly anti-Linux seemingly blindly-in-love-with-MS posts would consistently make it through.
Since Slashdot first reported on the astroturfing, and especially because I haven't noticed a response from LinuxToday admitting to this, I have lost a good deal of respect for them. It's a shame that Linuxtoday had to resort to posting flames in order to get more visitors to come to their site. It's the same tactic that's often attributed to eWeek and others. If they would at least publically admit on their site that they were astroturfing, then maybe I can respect them again...
Other than these philosophical issues, it is a decent news site if you're interested in some of the noteworthy linux headlines.
make world, not war
What really bites is that the whole system just ignores things like this. One decent guy goes, whoa this is wrong, I'll tell the people in charge, I'm sure they'll do something about it. Haha life ain't like that. The guys in charge probably put him up for it. Do you have to take a ethical zombie test to make it into management these days? I've seen many people take genuine grievences up the corporate ladder, only to get thrown off and swept under the carpet. But one day, one day (and it looks like it's happening now for these guys) the genuine grievence comes back and bites the whole corporation on the a%*e. =)
I also have to wonder about the validity of these emails and message board posts that show up on shows like CNN's 'talkback live' or 'news site'. Not trying to sound like a conspiracy nut, but we know the media massages news to their liking, how are we to know that they dont try to portray joe six-pack as being in favor or against said subject?
This happens in dead-tree publications on a routine basis, so I'd be surprised *not* to see it in online publications that let the admins - as opposed to the users - choose which replies have prominence.
[User-moderated boards have their own problems, as we all know.]
In the publications around here (Toronto, Canada), papers will typically print "letters to the editor" that either a) continue an existing argument amongst readers, or b) provoke a flood of replies. Note that sanity and accuracy are not listed as requirements; they're an incidental side effect. Sometimes.
The purpose of the letters section is the same as any other section of the newspaper (other than ads) - to get people reading and keep people reading. Not to be accurate for accuracy's own sake.
Astroturfing and other message forgery is still illegal, but selective filtering is standard practice.
This story has almost spawned a second story: The reactions of the Linux Press and the Linux Community and the ways in which they differ.
Since Rob Knapp and I put up our petition asking LT to come clean, I've heard from members of the LT community and members of the Linux press.
The journalistic responses I got were mostly disheartening. Most didn't want to "attack" a comrade in arms. Some said that nobody cares what goes on in talkbacks, anyway. One of the original naysayers, to his credit, did go back and check his own biases by asking what other people thought.
What this journalist found is what many members of the LT community expressed to me: Sure, we take talkbacks with a grain of salt. However, when the forum posts a policy and says that it will be fair, we expect the forum itself to play by its own rules. The people who run a moderated forum have a fair amount of power with regard to the contents of that forum. It is wrong to exercise that power cynically.
This is especially true of a site like LT, that built, and, I fear, is squandering, a valuable and positive reputation among its community members.
I would like to end with a word about Michael Hall, the current LT editor.
Michael is in a nearly impossible position. The Linux Today staff is mostly gone. So far as I can tell, the only free-lance writer still being published is Dennis Powell.
Michael is doing yeoman's work trying to keep LT useful to its community. That's a tall order for one person. I ask people not to take their frustrations with LT out on Michael personally.
As always, I speak for no one but myself.
Dean Pannell
(a.k.a. dinotrac)