I found this on sci.med.diseases
An excellent piece.

The fake persuaders

http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,715159,00.html

Corporations are inventing people to rubbish their opponents on the
internet

George Monbiot
Tuesday May 14, 2002
The Guardian

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 had never done before, and
retract a paper it had published.

Article continues

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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
organisation 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 November 29 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 listserver used by more than 3,000 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 "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 account 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 US 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 Centre For Food and
Agricultural Research". The centre 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.

� www.monbiot.com

If someone is unjustly "accused" they have a chance to comment. That way trolling will not be so effective. And this is whether it is in the Medical or General section.

But thank you for posting this. It is truly scary information, not least because it seems crazy to even contemplate the existence of this kind of behavior. But the Guardian is a reputable publication. Maybe there was something to this whole troll fiasco.

If you want to see "real" trolls, then you should take a look at sci.med now.

Many thanks for posting this.

It is hard to imagaine any issue more important to any of us than the increasingly difficult one of knowing what is real information and what is disinformation bandied about to control public opinion.

Nowhere is this more true it would seem than in health care where the stakes on all sides are so high.

In my opinion, this thread very much does therefore belong on the medical questions board. It is just most unfortunate that people who are so ill must also deal with so many perplexing questions.

I believe that it is critical to do our homework and understand the context and history of the struggles that are taking place.

Beyond that, I think that it is necessary to throughly understand that although many if not most of us grew up thinking that the world was largely motiviated by the pursuit of truth- for increasing numbers of entities and people that is no longer true.

We are the melting pot of chronic lyme disease, for lack of a better metaphor...Meaning that we are the group of patients, activists, and community members who are fighting the good fight against lyme disease.

We work hard at supporting one another and seeking the best ways to battle lyme and coninfections. We achieve our goals.

This makes us a bit of a threat to those who wish to forward the theory of short term antibiotics for lyme....and psychological issues as the basis for our longer term problems.

We very effectively disseminate information. This makes us an unwelcomed group to insurers, et al....

To disrupt Lymenet damages an effective tool for support for lymies all over the US and the world. To discredit lymenet and to find this board as a high pitched emotional battle ground is the goal of a troll or interloper.

We are dealing with emotional issues, we are dealing with neuro lyme which can leave us feeling not as steady as we would otherwise, leading us to behave in more emotional, volatile ways sometimes.

To take advantage of this is not difficult. To portray us as "whacked" would be easy if the heat were turned up high enough.

This is why we guard more closely against a perceived troll. We need for this community to be a safe container for discourse and support.

Knowing all of this, when I see a post that is inflamatory or beligerant, I assume that it comes from neuro lyme days or from a troll. One needs to be handled gracefully, the other with direct concern. Determining which is which usually isn't too tough.

Our most recent batch of interlopers were more skilled than usual...A tough call at first.

This is the job of a moderator. To determine the real thing from neuro lyme, and to act to maintain the integrity of this safe place for lyme patients seeking support.

On the surface of it, this sounds pretty easy and largely boring. In action, it's tougher to do that one would think. It requires grace, decisiveness, a cool head, and the willingness to do the hard thing for the sake of the community.

We can be a tough crowd here...I wouldn't want to be a moderator here. I'm too busy and too sick to do it properly, as most of us are. I support moderators who are willing to step up and do this tough job.

Remember that our moderators are human as well as the protors in this classroom. They need our help as much as we need theirs.