Slashdot Mirror
PayPerPost VC Defends Ethics of Paid Blogging
An anonymous reader writes "PayPerPost venture capitalist and board member Dan Rua defends the ethics of paid editorials. He claims PayPerPost is 'good for the internet' and is not simply blackhat SEO. Rua states that PayPerPost has blown past its milestone of 15,500 bloggers, and is earning hundreds of thousands in monthly revenue. He describes PayPerPost's most viral product yet — ReviewMyPost — which pays people to link to paid posts. The LA Times accuses PayPerPost of paying bloggers to make up fictional testimonials. For instance, the Times reports that a law firm is using PayPerPost to pay bloggers to write that a certain birth control patch is killing and injuring young women. Rua does not deny these claims, but simply states they are the exception and not the rule. How long before the FTC follows through on their promise to enforce blogger disclosure?"
Paid bloggers are almost as trustworthy as, I dunno, fake critics from even larger corporations..
Anonymity breeds distrust in public communication. Whether it's trolling for fun or misinforming for profit, the upshot is a building general distrust of the communications channel itself. It is literally communications breakdown.
The only solution to this is full authentication of every user on every computer throughout the net, with some government controlled centralized database. In other words, DRM on steroids. And the total end of anonymous political dissent.
Which is worse? I have my opinion.
That's fine, but a "law firm paying bloggers to lie that a birth control patch is killing people" is just unconscionable smarmy stacked on top of smarmy.
People in that law firm, and their bloggers, need to go to jail.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
How's it any different than all the obvious Apple ads that get posted as "news" right here on /.?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You know full well that speech is controlled in many different ways to promote the common good e.g. truth in advertising.
Speech is never controlled for the public good... although censorship is always justified as being "for the public good". Speech is controlled to benifit the ruling class and the rich and powerful. So called "truth-in-advertising" laws are designed to make people less suspicious of advertising ("It is against the law to advertise falsehood... therefore I can believe commercials"), when in fact outright fraudulent claims happen all the time, the English language is ambiguous which makes it possible to make virtually any claim while at the same time being in compliance with laws, and there is no way the government can possibly evaluate all possible advertisment claims for falsehood.
A free society that admits there is falsehood in advertising, and there is virtually nothing the government can do to stop anything short of outright fraud, is one where people are skeptical and on-guard. The society where the government says "we are protecting you from false advertisment", are the people who will will blindly believe everything they see and hear, secure in knowing that the benevolent state is protecting them from any fraud.
Again, willfully misinterpreting what I said for your own ends. You know full well I was referring to his "business", not his opinion.
Do you have any understanding that laws are enforced with violence? That throwing people in jail destroys lives and families? That having large amounts of people in prison not only costs society billions of dollars, but leaves people open to exploitation as well as encouraging a prison-industrial complex? That prisons often act as criminal universities where people who have made a few mistakes are indoctrinated into a life of crime? There is also a terrible danger in any law of the law being used as a pretext for distructive policies like racial profiling, and for the eroding of civil liberties.
Criminal law is a very dangerous thing, to only be used when some behavior is such a clear and present danger as to warrent the social problems and risks to civil liberties involved. To suggest that we should throw people in prison for something as minor as paying people to blog a product is vicious, cruel, and authoritarian. Especially when all that is nessicary is to let people know that a company has been promoting fake blogging, and people will neither trust that company nor that blog for a very very long time. The only reason I can think of that you want to throw this person in jail is because you get off on that kind of thing.
And now we have the straw man. There are many possibilities, you've just chosen the one you think you can argue against. Some other ways to reduce/stop it would be to rely on competitors and consumers to report it, do statistical analysis of blog traffic and to make the penalties so severe (e.g. per-sale fines and executives personally liable) that even a small chance of being caught makes it unprofitable.
OK, so we rely on competitors and consumers to report it... So corporations will give false reports to harm competitors, and consumers will give false reports based on other issues (they don't like the blogger's race, their politics, their negative review of a product they like). This solution leaves people completly innocent of the crime open to terrible abuse, abuse that is worse than the crime itself. Doing statistical analysis of blog traffic? First, how are they going to do statistical analysis of blog traffic without compromising people's civil liberties by forcing non-suspects to turn in their web statistics to government? Second, how does statistical analysis of their blog traffic reveal that they were paid to give a product a good review?
Finally, make the penalties so severe that even a small change of being caught makes it unprofitable? You mean like the U.S. and its War on Drugs? Which put millions of people in prison (t
How do you intend to enforce a law saying that bloggers must reveal that they have been paid for a positive review, without compromising the anonymity and freedom that people enjoy on the internet?
In order to prove that a blogger is in fact acting against the FTC rule, you would have to show that they are explicitly receiving money in exchange for the review. Since neither people involved in the transaction have any incentive to reveal the transaction, you have go with a bunch of very expensive, and very dangerous (from a civil liberties standpoint) activities such as undercover sting operations like creating fake law enforcement blogs (which is the very crime they are supposedly fighting against), massive phone tapping and email tapping... or some sort of licensing and supervision scheme for blogs.
Of course, it is even harder than with something like drugs, because if the people involved don't explicitly agree to some sort of payment deal, and just have an unspoken understanding, you can't charge them with anything. Apple could easily just send out a check (or more likely, free "evaluation" Apple products), with no explanation or stated strings attached, to bloggers who give a positive review of Apple products. There would be absolutely no evidence whatsoever to convict Apple on any misdealing. Unless you want to throw people in jail or fine them on purely circumstantial evidence, which most would consider a grave violation of civil liberties.
There is no way to enforce any kind of rule on this in any effective way, without compromising the freedom, anonymity of the internet, and the civil liberties of those on the internet.