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Companies Use "Fake Citizens" To Sway Public Opinion
Insert Moles Into Email Groups, Messageboards, Websites

5/31/03 1:50:07 PM
George Mobiot

Commentary -- http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=510

The Fake Persuaders

Companies are creating false citizens to try to change the way we think

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 14th May 2002

Persuasion works best when it's invisible. The most effective marketing
worms its way into our consciousness, leaving intact the perception that
we have reached our opinions and made our choices independently. As old as
humankind itself, over the past few years this approach has been refined,
with the help of the internet, into a technique called "viral marketing".
Last
month, the viruses appear to have murdered their host. One of the world's
foremost scientific journals was persuaded to do something it has never
done before, and retract a paper it had published.

While, in the past, companies have created fake citizens' groups to
campaign in favour of trashing forests or polluting rivers, now they
create fake citizens. Messages purporting to come from disinterested punters
are
planted on listservers at critical moments, disseminating misleading
information in the hope of recruiting real people to the cause. Detective
work by the campaigner Jonathan Matthews and the freelance journalist Andy
Rowell shows how a PR firm contracted to the biotech company Monsanto
appears to
have played a crucial but invisible role in shaping scientific discourse.

Monsanto knows better than any other corporation the costs of visibility.
Its clumsy attempts, in 1997, to persuade people that they wanted to eat
GM food all but destroyed the market for its crops. Determined never to make
that mistake again, it has engaged the services of a firm which knows how to
persuade without being seen to persuade. The Bivings Group specialises in
internet lobbying.

An article on its website, entitled "Viral Marketing: How to Infect the
World" warns that "there are some campaigns where it would be undesirable
or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organization is
directly involved ... it simply is not an intelligent PR move. In cases such
as
this, it is important to first "listen" to what is being said online ...
Once
you are plugged into this world, it is possible to make postings to these
outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party. ... Perhaps
the
greatest advantage of viral marketing is that your message is placed into
a context where it is more likely to be considered seriously." A senior
executive from Monsanto is quoted on the Bivings site, thanking the PR
firm for its "outstanding work".

On 29 November last year, two researchers at the University of California,
Berkeley published a paper in Nature magazine, which claimed that native
maize in Mexico had been contaminated, across vast distances, by GM pollen.
The
paper was a disaster for the biotech companies seeking to persuade Mexico,
Brazil and the European Union to lift their embargos on GM crops.

Even before publication, the researchers knew their work was hazardous.
One of them, Ignacio Chapela, was approached by the director of a Mexican
corporation, who first offered him a glittering research post if he
withheld his paper, then told him that he knew where to find his children.
In the
US, Chapela's opponents have chosen a different form of assassination.

On the day the paper was published, messages started to appear on a
biotechnology listsever used by more than 3000 scientists, called
AgBioWorld.

The first came from a correspondent named "Mary Murphy". Chapela is on the
board of directors of the Pesticide Action Network, and therefore, she
claimed, "not exactly what you'd call an unbiased writer." Her posting was
followed by a message from an "Andura Smetacek", claiming, falsely, that
Chapela's paper had not been peer-reviewed, that he was "first and
foremost an activist", and that the research had been published in collusion
with
environmentalists. The next day, another email from "Smetacek" asked the
list, "how much money does Chapela take in speaking fees, travel
reimbursements and other donations ... for his help in misleading
fear-based marketing campaigns?"

The messages from Murphy and Smetacek stimulated hundreds of others, some
of which repeated or embellished the accusations they had made. Senior
biotechnologists called for Chapela to be sacked from Berkeley. AgBioWorld
launched a petition pointing to the paper's "fundamental flaws".

There do appear to be methodological problems with the research Chapela
and his colleague David Quist had published, but this is hardly
unprecedented
in a scientific journal. All science is, and should be, subject to challenge
and disproof. But in this case the pressure on Nature was so severe that its
editor did something unparalleled in its 133-year history: last month he
published, alongside two papers challenging Quist and Chapela's, a
retraction, in which he wrote that their research should never have been
published.

So the campaign against the researchers was extraordinarily successful;
but who precisely started it? Who are "Mary Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek"?

Both claim to be ordinary citizens, without any corporate links. The
Bivings Group says it has "no knowledge of them". "Mary Murphy" uses a
hotmail account for posting messages to AgBioWorld. But a message satirising
the
opponents of biotech, sent by "Mary Murphy" from the same hotmail address
to another server two years ago contains the identification bw6.bivwood.com.
Bivwood.com is the property of Bivings Woodell, which is part of the
Bivings Group. When I wrote to her to ask whether she was employed by
Bivings and
whether Mary Murphy was her real name, she replied that she had "no ties
to industry". But she refused to answer my questions on the grounds that "I
can see by your articles that you made your mind up long ago about biotech".
The interesting thing about this response is that my message to her did not
mention biotechnology. I told her only that I was researching an article
about internet lobbying.

Smetacek has, on different occasions, given her address as "London"
and "New York". But the electoral rolls, telephone directories and credit
card records in both London and the entire United States reveal no "Andura
Smetacek". Her name appears only on AgBioWorld and a few other
listservers, on which she has posted scores of messages falsely accusing
groups such as
Greenpeace of terrorism. My letters to her have elicited no response. But
a clue to her possible identity is suggested by her constant promotion of
"the Center For Food and Agricultural Research". The center appears not to
exist, except as a website, which repeatedly accuses greens of plotting
violence.
Cffar.org is registered to someone called Manuel Theodorov. Manuel
Theodorov is the "director of associations" at Bivings Woodell.

Even the website on which the campaign against the paper in Nature was
launched has attracted suspicion. Its moderator, the biotech enthusiast
Professor CS Prakash, claims to have no connection to the Bivings Group.
But when Jonathan Matthews was searching the site's archives he received the
following error message: "can't connect to MySQL server
on 'apollo.bivings.com'". Apollo.bivings.com is the main server of the
Bivings Group.

"Sometimes," Bivings boasts, "we win awards. Sometimes only the client
knows the precise role we played." Sometimes, in other words, real people
have no idea that they are being managed by fake ones.

14th May 2002