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Tuesday, May 14, 2002 8:54 PM

[DiscloseTheTruth] Corporations are inventing people to rubbish their

opponents onthe internet

 

 

The fake persuaders: Corporations are inventing people to rubbish their

opponents on the internet

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,715158,00.html

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.

 

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