Are some people commenting in forums for $$$?

Besides the blogosphere there's the--what, threadisphere? All those comments on articles in newspapers and media websites. 


Turns out a fair number of those comments are being made either by people who are doing it for money, or who were directed there by people doing the directing for money by setting up Astroturf propaganda websites.


On Amazon.com's Science forum someone has been starting human-affected climate change denialist threads for over a year--one after another after another. I don't know if he's doing it for pay but something's seriously off here (he's also flagrantly violating Amazon.com standards, which forbid incessant posting of the same topic repeatedly).


I wrote an entry on the Amazon.com Science forum about special interest money invading supposedly "free forums,": citing investigative research by The Guardian and Greenpeace (one a leftist newspaper, the other a leftist advocacy group, to be sure).


A guy on an Amazon.com forum contested my entry, saying the accusation of doing entries for money was intrinsically illegitimate--something that just resulted in tit for tat accusations.

The short answer:

The money trails do matter because this isn't a formal debating society-it's a forum of intellectual exploration, and it does influence what we should do if it appears that certain posters are here to push propaganda for pay, or as pawns of those who direct them here.

Moreover, this is a widespread problem across all public forums that deal with science and technology-not just Amazon.com. Too widespread, and too much by people who obviously are not natural members of the forums.

I strongly suspect that this is one of those conspiracies that do exist (among the countless fake ones)-and you should care whether someone's trying to play you like a flute. (see Hamlet if you don't recall the scene where he asks Rosencranz and Gildenstern to play a flute, and when they say they can't, asks they why they're trying to play him.)

The long answer:

It is true that in the logic of formal debate, my character/motives are only relevant if I'm asking you to trust me as part of my argument..

So if an axe murderer says 2+2+4, I don't need to trust him--I can use my knowledge of arithmetic to verify it. But if he says "my former cellmate told me he killed Johnny Pell" that's more problematic, and I won't believe him without independent confirmation. And if Mrs. Jones sues her father for molesting her as a child--after he disinherited her for being a drug addict--I'm going to need a lot of independent validation before I believe her claim.

However, what I see being done by far right wing billionaires and their minions is the attempt to convince the public that many more people agree with their propaganda than actually do. This is an implicit "fact" that's very important. As are attempts to mold public opinion through propaganda amplified by vast funds used to pay "serviceable villains" who promote their patron's viewpoint for money.

After all, legislators are generally more impressed by perceived numbers of voters on one side of an issue, rather than by sweet reason alone. So this isn't a minor issue. And, humans being the social creatures they are, if you think many, many people hold a particular view, you'll be more daunted than if you think it's just a handful of loons.

Social experiments done over the past 70 years have revealed how susceptible most people are to what they perceive as public opinion.

Every single day the major broadcast news media--all of them--constantly refer to "public opinion" yet almost never talk about whether or how that "public opinion" was carefully guided by slick, well-financed psy ops. Vast applications of money to American political debate has greatly shaped it.

And Goebbels, an expert propagandist, accurately observed that if someone hears a lie repeated often enough he'll come to perceive it as truth, often as not. Even the way we think about issues. From "death taxes" to "death panels" to "tax relief" we're given a conclusion at the start of our thinking about something. See George Lakoff for information about this from a cognitive psychologist's viewpoint.

Moreover, in these forums, we're accustomed to believing that people come here with questions and issues they want to explore/debate. However, what if the person you're debating with is being payed to advance his position? Wouldn't that change your willingness to debate with him--realizing that nothing you say will change his mind, because he's not here for the same reasons as you are?

He might be here as a missionary, or perhaps as a "threadstitute" (I just made that up). But either way you're wasting your time arguing with him.

So it's the implicit propositions that "this is a widely held belief" which can be validated/invalidated by seeing whether there's a money trail.

And surely you realize that "everybody does it" is the standard fallback position of a propagandist who's been uncovered.

So of course if you turn over the rock and discover Koch and Exxon minions scuttling around under it, they're going to start chanting "Soros, Soros, Soros." Especially since they regard him (and Buffet, and perhaps Gates) as a "class traitor."

However, the Koch brothers have a financial motive: they're major polluters, major beneficiaries of corporate welfare, major promoters of government taking other people's property and handing it over to them.

Soros is a money guy who doesn't gain personally from his financial contributions. So his motive is philosophical, not pecuniary. That's a big difference. Doesn't mean he's right and the Kochs are wrong on the face of it, but it is relevant to my evaluation of their activities.

Moreover, the Kochs are deceptive/underhanded, while Soros is pretty straightforward. Soros donates money to campaigns and politicians he approves of. The Kochs are major creators of astroturf operations that try to create the impression of being grassroots affairs.

Case in point: Right wing psy ops operatives trained Tea Party volunteers to sit spaced apart at public healthcare forums, then to interrupt pro-reform speakers by shouting verbal assaults thinly disguised as questions, then shut up immediately so as to avoid being thrown out, while another trained "volunteer" sitting somewhere else would immediately shout out another phony "question." And another, and another. By not massing, by not just standing up and shouting until they were removed, by asking pseudoquestions that maintained a tiny fig leaf of respectability, they could not only destroy pro-healthcare reform people from presenting their pitch--they could also make it seem as though the whole audience was against healthcare reform.

And here you have one person--"mug wump" posting the same thread topic with minor wording variations time after time after time for over a year.

I think it's relevant to speculate on how such a major imposition on Amazon.com's Science forum came to be. This forum isn't just formal debate--a field I'm intimately familiar with--it's also psy ops--another field I've been forced to educated myself about, due to stuff like this.

Of course "mug wump" [the guy doing the serial denialist postings]  might just be a pawn--but if he 'fessed up and told us where he's getting his info from, I bet the trail of breadcrumbs would lead back to Koch Industries or one of its subsidiaries.

And that's my last point. This isn't just going on at Amazon.com. I've seen the same thing happening all over the place--Scientific American, NYTimes, Washington Post, you name it.

And in particular I'm seeing major invasions of online forums by people who don't belong there--whose illogic and poor grammar/spelling reveal that they aren't actual members of that community. The New York Times by people who clearly aren't New York Times readers; Scientific American's forums likewise, and so forth.

So how did they get there? These people aren't, for the most part, geniuses at ferreting out stuff. I'm betting they're being directed to go hither and thither by paid operatives running Astroturf websites.

So yes, the money does matter, and while adherents of both parties try to market their ideas to the public, one side has vastly more to spend on it than the other, because one side represents billionaires while the other represents wage slaves.

It's not an equal fight. We're being bullied, and having been a bright kid who went to blue-collar public schools, I became way too familiar with both bullying and with anti-intellectualism-which pervades the propaganda of the far right. Look at all the posts by the pawns and the threadstitutes-they're chock full of scorn and contempt for smart people-all them scientist types. Doesn't that get your back up?

The billionaires' bully boys storm in here and tell us how they spit on us and how they expect us to knuckle under to them-that they are the Real Americans and we're some kinda unAmericans.

And they violate Amazon.com's forum guidelines routinely. They don't play the game by the rules you and I observe, and I'm trying to get the decent people on these forums to fight back and not keep playing their game by their self-serving rules.

They can set up their own forum and run it any way they please, but here they should observe Amazon's guidelines, along with the rest of us.

They have no honor.

Don't feed the trolls--I know it's hard, but don't feed them. Really. Don't.

My first experience with a troll was on an immigration forum, back when the NY Times hosted subject forums & not just comment threads on articles.

And she was a liberal troll. They aren't just right wing nutjobs. Any nutjob will do.

She seemed reasonable at first. Very collegial with other participants, as long as they agreed with her pro-illegal immigrant stance. But she was quick to call anyone who demurred a troll (and some were, to be sure), and if something fired her up she'd spam the thread, cutting and pasting in lengthy lyrics to pro-illegal immigrant ballads and so much other stuff the thread became nearly useless.

Things haven't gotten better. Now whenever an article on a hot button topic has a comment thread, it seems like 2/3 of the comments will be from trolls.

They're troll comments because they're usually rants filled with ad hominem attacks and raising red herring issues. The trolls always accept anything anyone on their side says at face value, while denying that anything said on the other side has the slightest credibility, and further claiming that it's the product of a vast conspiracy.

Usually trollspam is obvious, due to the level of invective and the semiliterate writing. It's usually offtopic as well. For example, trolls flooded a recent Washington Post op-ed piece advocating more involvement of scientists in public forums to combat disinformation campaigns about climate change, evolution and the like.

But there's a more sinister kind. These are usually long posts, literate-seeming, and seeming to raise plausible objections to climate change, evolution, atheism, abortion etc. I say "seeming" because the objections are almost always red herrings--things that have already been raised and settled within the valid community of thought/knowledge of the field being discussed.

These posts always draw equally long, literate answers from valid members of the community of thought who've gotten sucked into the trap. It's a trap because it usually diverts people's brainpower from the real issues to phony ones and diverts the comment thread into topics of the opponents' choosing--always variations of the "have you quit beating your wife? Yes or No." attack. Thus the climate change opponents want to divert climate change threads onto discussions of "Climategate"--a pseudoscandal with no bearing on the real issues.

Seems like most of the trollspam comes from the same cranky old coots who call into CSPAN talk shows and all those AM radio talk shows. In my stereotype they usually have a thick hick Southern accent and sound like they're red-faced and shouting.

We got to see them in the flesh at the congressional town hall meetings on healthcare.

And like those meetings, these attacks appear to be orchestrated to varying degrees.

Whether orchestrated or not, they fill comment threads with so much chaff that they make many of them nearly useless--as well as leaving average readers with a false impression of how representative these nutjobs are.

Even if you think there's no such thing as human-caused climate change, that we didn't evolve, that abortion is a mortal sin etc.--you shouldn't approve of dirty, anti-democratic tactics used in support of such stances. If you do, you're saying that your positions can't be defended honestly. What does that say about such positions?

As for the issue of whether these threadspammings are orchestrated...from the point of view of the far right, they do disrupt "enemy" communications and create misleading impressions. And they are diverse enough to give all readers something, from the literate-seeming to the thug shouters writing in all caps. It's not like the crude old days when a congressman would get thousands of identical letters. These are all different...they still say the same things, though.

The thing that makes me suspicious of orchestration is how many comments come from people who are obviously not real readers of the publication--and how quickly they come. Thus you'll have someone writing at a 5th grade level, commenting on an editorial on Scientific American Magazine's website--and doing so shortly after the editorial was published. I've been reading SciAm for decades. I know what the readership is like. These drooling nutjobs aren't part of it.

So where'd they come from? How did they learn about this editorial? Who told them? And if SciAm, why not the NYTimes and Washington Post and everything else. The issues involved generally have seriously big money weighing in--for example, energy companies like Exxon on climate change. Exxon has spent many, many millions of dollars campaigning against it. Just a few of those dollars would be sufficient to cover having a few dozen operatives tracking every relevant publication and communicating via websites with their simian shock troops.

It's what I'd do if I worked for Exxon and had no morals whatsoever.