If people are paid for postive reviews, where does that leave an honest blogger? Are online mercenaries the last straw that breaks the camel’s back.

I think just about every story I’ve read about the benefits of citizen journalism, or blogging / micro-blogging etc brings up the issue of the uncensored nature of this kind of writing; that’s it’s free from the influences of editors and PR machines, and that it is to be valued for its independence and “truth”.

But what happens when people are paid to provide positive content for facebook, twitter, on blogs and I guess even face-to-face?

Many of us “crowdsource” via twitter, asking for recommendations for everything from a restaurant to a plumber. We get responses from people who follow us, but what if some of those people who follow you are “crowdturfers”?  They look real, but they are paid to be positive about a subject and get a “valued first-person experience”, “non-PR aligned” “opinion” “out there” in the ether.

Recently, Ed Charles from Tomato Melbourne posted a link to someone’s Gumtree ad on twitter.  That ad offered “lengthy and positive” posts on a particular website to restaurant owners, at no cost to the restaurant. The fee-for-service would appear to be very little and come from advertising revenue on a site I’ve never seen before, and is quite unlovable in design. I think only desperate restauraters would take up the offer.  But I haven’t seen shilling so blantantly advertised before. I will assume that there is some other trade-off for the person offering the services as the likely income generated is not much, and the business model has been challenged in other publications.

This led to a really interesting discussion on twitter about the ethics of blogging which I will document in another post, but for now my question is, if crowdturfing takes off what value does your blog/twitter account have.  How can you verify and protect your online persona?  Do you care?

* I took the term “crowdturfing” from an article in The Age, attributable to Ben Zhao, an Associate Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The relavant extract is below as is the link to the full article.

“… the crucial ingredient of a novel form of attack, recently detailed by computer scientists in California, is not software, but people. Growing numbers of mercenaries are being hired to help twist the landscape of social media – to write rave reviews of products, post convincing spam, set up accounts on social networks, or perform other tasks.This gives their employers new ways to do everything from legally questionable marketing to outright theft.

…just glancing at one of the profiles you would probably think it came from a real person; you might read the opinions, and perhaps click on a link or two.

”They looked too real,” said Zhao, ”to be machine generated.”

The accounts were the product of what Zhao has dubbed ”crowdturfing” – a combination of ”astroturfing” and ”crowdsourcing”. Astroturfing is an older term that refers to fake grassroots efforts, such as secretly paying people to send notes to their senator in favour of a bill.

Crowdsourcing is outsourcing to a crowd – a form of mass collaboration in which someone puts out a public request for help with a large number of well-defined tasks.

Combine the two and you get websites such as one called Zhubajie in China, which publishes offers for work like singing the praises of a particular dress on social media.”

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/new-kinds-of-dark-forces-are-being-unleashed-online-20120108-1pq2f.html#ixzz1iuzXBut6

This entry was posted Monday, January 9th, 2012 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Opinion Pieces . You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.