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LinuxToday Editor Apologizes For Astroturfing
Thanks to Dean Pannell (and Paul Ferris for the initial head's up) for pointing out the apology and statement of fact from Kevin Reichard, the Executive Editor of LinuxToday. I think the argument that people would know that "George Tirebiter" was merely a contrivance is weak, but whatever. You can read the previous stories in the astroturf [?] ing saga.
> Plus it contains grammatical mistakes, which looks kind of bad when your job title includes "editor".
Nod a nissue, far Linux-friendly geek cites.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Alan Cox - Subject: Astroturfing ( Aug 8, 2001, 20:13:51 )
So you've now publically admitted impersonating people in public and making libellous comments about me and other community members. Can you clear up one detail - why are you still working for internet.com/linuxtoday ?
Alan
Having worked for a major (i.e. Media Metrix top 10) news and links portal, I can honestly say that this practice of "astroturfing" (as I understand the word) is not limited to small sites like LinuxToday.
Part of my job description as the maintainer of a chunk of the site hierarchy was to use a whole stack of pseudonyms and basically wander around doing just this in the interest of generating page views, responses, and "positive" discussion for advertisers and reviewed products in a number of areas. This was not optional, it was expected.
I'd be surprised if this is a rare practice.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I sincerely apologize to those of you who were offended by my actions.
Mom: Now Kevin, apologize to Suzie for what you did!
Kevin: I'm sorry that you don't like your pigtails dipped in permanent ink, Suzie.
He's apologizing that we were offended by his actions, not for his actions themselves. Big difference there.
He doesn't even mention the other points, like trying to avoid linking to competing sites.
LinuxToday used to have value because they posted *everything* and you could go there to quickly find anything going on in the Linux world. Now that's no longer the case.
Not surprisingly Internet.com has ruined them, and just about every other Linux property they touched. Reichard should be promptly fired, but instead he'll probably stay there until Internet.com folds or does away with the Linux channel. I hope this indiscretion travels with him so no one else is foolish enough to hire him.
Interestingly, the apology is under "normal news" so they don't even seem to consider it important enough to put at the top of the site.
Thanks. That was very interesting (and the slashdot editors deserve to be called on the carpet for that sort of thing). My critique of your logic in your previous statement stands, but my personal opinions as to the veracity of your accusations against the slashdot editors has been modified from "yeah, right" to "hmm...there may be something to what you say."
/. editors will take this sort of criticism for what it is and modify their behavior in the future, rather than "bitchslapping" (is that your term, or theirs?) posts like these down. People do fuck up, and it is through being called on it, and changing one's behavior, that not only goods and services such as slashdot are improved, but so are we as people.
Hopefully the
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Considering THIS post, to the LT talkback:
Thank you for the apology. Here is one reader who appreciates it and will continue to recommend Linux Today as _the_ premier news site for all things Linux.
Cheers,
Caleb
How much do you want to bet Kevin Reichard is still posting under assumed names? I mean c'mon, at least be more subtle!
like George Tirebiter which I believed readers would understand was a contrivance.
Well, since I went to high school with a guy named Mike Hunt, a name would have to be extremely obvious, much more so than "Tirebiter," to make me suspect a fake-that's-obviously-fake name. (His full name was Michael Steven Hunt, and he went by Steven.) There was also a family at a different school with the surname Homo. There are many, many interesting and different names out there, and as always: Ass-U-Me.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
And yes, they do moderate: I remember Hemos telling the WPI ACM that they spend time moderating down the trolls after a story goes live.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
In RealSpace, he was "the doughty unofficial mascot of USC (Univ. South. Calif.) athletic teams in earlier times, renowned for his devotion to attacking the spinning wheels of large American automobiles...."
In the Firesign Theater world, he's the Everyman protaganist of the comedy album "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers" (which appears to be out of print, although I found a cassette in a local record store). It's high comedy from Firesign Theater, a team that was known for a counter-cultural radio program in the sixties. It's very funny, but requires FULL attention, a strong liberal arts background, and occassionaly several listens, to get a large percentage of the jokes.
Check out the entry for DWARF to get a feel for the humor.
That said, even though I got the reference, I don't think seeing a post under the name George Tirebiter would make me think "Oh - It's the editor!" or "He's just joking!". I would instead think "This guy is a pretty poor satirist - it's like posting under 'Chaucer'".
A-ha! I've caught Taco astroturfing slashdot!
Best Slashdot Co
Yeah, I could see "George Tirebiter" being a contrivance. It's about as blaringly screaming "ignore me, I'm a mo-ron" as "Anonymous Coward". But for someone in charge to be doing it...guh.
A few years back when I worked for TOTK.com Sports, I had a fellow staff member fake some email [or so he thought] from the current President of the United States. It sounded just a bit too much like this one guy...and when I traced it out, it was him. I "fired" [in the sense that I never let him write again] him on the spot. Though we were "new media", I wasn't going to put up with pointless bullshit. Scary to think that a college sophomore [at the time] had more balls than a "major new media company" like internet.com does at present.
Oh well, I never read LT much anyway. This just assures that I never will.
-- Geof F. Morris
The really sad thing is of course that this is completely true, as has already been demonstrated.
ahem. Basic logic please.
It does not follow that, because moderators have moderated the parent to your post down to zero, that those moderators were slashdot editors. Far more likely that slashdot readers with moderator priveleges modded the post down as the flaimbait it certainly appeared to be (to me at least, although I do not have moderator priveleges right now).
The slashdot editors are the ones who decide which stories get posted (decisions I disagree with as often as not BTW), not those readers who happen to have moderator priveleges at a given moment.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
So will all the names being used be apologzing?
Slashdot posted a link to a site which already had trouble paying its bandwidth. Of course it was slashdotted into oblivion. The owner responded by redirecting all slashdotters to goatse.cx.
Every post which said something about this was modded down instantly, and the front page claimed
'link removed because people were being redirected randomly'.
Randomly eh?
--
GCP
I'm with you all the way Rob...I mean Jeff, yeah, that's it. Jeff.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I personally think that these fine gentlemen have, by virtue of their effusive apology, proved themselves to be well and truly sorry, and that we should all forgive them their minor trespasses. Who's with me?
-Kevin Richard... I mean, uh Ben. That's it. Ben.
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
The apology has that forced sound of someone who doesn't understand or doesn't want to understand why their actions were wrong.
Plus it contains grammatical mistakes, which looks kind of bad when your job title includes "editor".
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
An editor of a respected news portal should never have commited something like this. In paper media it would have been much better to resign and safe face afterwards. This person using psudonames trolled LinuxToday's talkback forums and flamed Linux, Linus, SlashDot etc. Often he used anti-linux and sentiments and questioned the existance of an opensource/linux community. He should resign IMHO. If LinuxToday is to be respected, this is the only way out for this publication.
It doesn't sound like the editor is acknowledging that he did anything wrong, just saying "I won't do it again because other people misunderstood."
There are good reasons to post anonymously under some circumstances, but I don't think he gives any here. How would the debate have been any less "lively" if he had acknowledged the source of his comments all along?
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
My name is Billy Evans. I am a very sick little boy. My mother is typing this for me, because I can't. She is crying. The reason she is so sad is because I'm so sick. I was born without a body. It doesn't hurt, except when I try to breathe. The doctors gave me an artificial body. It is a burlap bag filled with leaves. The doctors said that was the best they could do on account of us having no money or insurance. I would like to have a body transplant, but we need more money. Mommy doesn't work because she said nobody hires crying people. I said, "Don't cry, Mommy," and she hugged my burlap bag. Mommy always gives me hugs, even though she's allergic to burlap and it makes her sneeze and chafes her real bad. I hope you will help me. You can help me if you forward this email to everyone you know. Forward it to people you don't know, too. Dr. Johansen said that for every person you forward this email to, Bill Gates will team up with AOL and send a nickel to NASA. With that funding, NASA will collect prayers from school children all over America and have the astronauts take them up into space so that the angels can hear them better. Then they will come back to earth and go to the Pope, and he will take up a collection in church and send all the money to the doctors. The doctors could help me get better then. Maybe one day I will be able to play baseball. Right now I can only be third base. Every time you forward this letter, the astronauts can take more prayers to the angels and my dream will be closer to coming true. Please help me. Mommy is so sad, and I want a body. I don't want my leaves to rot before I turn 10. If you don' tforward this email, that's okay. Mommy says you're a mean and heartless bastard who doesn't care about a poor little boy with only a head. She says that if you don't stew in the raw pit of your own guilt-ridden stomach, she hopes you die a long slow horrible death and then burn forever in hell. What kind of cruel person are you that you can't take five freakin' minutes to forward this to all your friends so that they can feel guilt and shame about ignoring a poor, bodiless nine-year-old boy? Please help me. I try to be happy, but it's hard. I wish I had a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty that wouldn't chew on me and try to bury its turds in the leaves of my burlap body. I wish that very much. Thank You, Billy "Smiley" Evans
As if we should believe him? I'm well aware of the current state of today's media. Journalistic integrity is a word that most media reporters and editors seem to have forgotten.
However, this is totally out of line, even by today's standards. Someone looking at his apology would think that he had just committed minor infractions. No, he was busily posting nastygrams about competitors and rivals.
He should just resign and get the heck out.
'crow
Heh.
I've said something similar to my wife more than once. I wonder if LT readers are sharper than she is...
Also, I noticed Kevin Reichard seemed to be having some really weird friends posting under his Talkback.
A certain Mike Moore posted this under the subject of "Excellent", A couple of posts below that, Eric Kiersky writes with subject "Kevin shouldnt apologize", At first look this all seem to be optimistic well wishers giving their support to Richard. But if you ever visted the Borg, you might wonder why those names seem so familiar.
Well, it just so happens that Kevin has some very good friends working backstage at one of the best authorites on Austroturfing.
With friends like that who needs enemies? Now, I wonder how far deep the fangs of corporate monopoly sinks in our community....
Trust the source!
A Slashdot editor would be easy to identify from the spelling and gramatical errors.
modding down? haha. I remember times when posts and even whole _threads_ were removed completely. ("technical difficulties" I believe was an excuse)
Dijkstra Considered Dead
That's not entirely the case. See my explanation in another thread in this story.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This speaks for itself. I have no respect for this man, or how he has behaved on their forums. Internet.com should fire the man posthaste.
--Maynard
It is their site and therefore it is NOT up to MS (or SmartTags) to modify
Now, if you're implying that Taco and company downgrade themselves messages that criticizes them, that's another thing entirely.
This does undoubtedly happen. It's referred to as the "bitchslap," and consists of an editor automatically moving a comment to -1, no matter what its previous rating. I remember this happening a long time ago with pb's "Will the Real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up" post - it was rated up to 5, Funny, bitchslapped by an editor down to -1, and then rated back up to 4, Funny, where it was left.
They also often downrate posts that criticize their editorial practices - for example, the first draft of the Slashdot story on the OSDN router outage contained a comment by CmdrTaco about how they waited for knowledgeable support to show up, and "when she did, she was much less knowledgeable than we had hoped," or something to that effect. This was quickly removed from the story, and when people in the comments reposted the original text of CmdrTaco's story, noting what had been removed, all those comments were immediately rated down to -1; much faster than any users could have done.
So it's pretty clear that the Slashdot editorship rates down comments themselves, and are not up-front about it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10