Corporations are inventing people to rubbish their opponents on the internet

[Guest guest]

Corporations are inventing people to rubbish their opponents on the

internet

 

George Monbiot

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 a " Mary Murphy " 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 [aka Emmanuel Theodorou] 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.

 

For more on MONSANTO's WEB OF DECEIT:

http://ngin.tripod.com/deceit_index.html