After a wee piece of direct action before breakfast, I thought I’d continue with my more speculative musing as to how to deepen ones activist credentials online.
The premise is that more time and effort one puts into an action, online or offline, then the more effect it has in the real world, which is kind of the point.
At Friends of the Earth I heard of a strange phenomenon that evolved on their community forums. A small group of contributors, started discussing how they were fed up with the right wing blogs (and similar) that kept on publishing scathing inaccurate reports of environmental issues / campaigns.
They decided to do something about it, and organised into an online raiding party. Each week they would pick a target and team members would regularly hit the target, ideally alternating members posting daily, to wind up the authors and to present a differing view.
In a similar vein marketing companies, I’m sure, offer a pay for hire online service, where you can promote your product via internet postings by a specialist team. Big Oil has used staff resources to promote climate skeptic arguments, where the same tired old arguments clearly come from the same old song sheets.
Finally the Chinese state allegedly employers an army of 50 cent’ers, (perhaps 100,000 of them) to post pro-state comments anywhere where there is a discussion of interest.
In the old days we called them trolls, in the modern era they’re viral marketeers.
One could suppose (and I would never suggest that we did this), that you could recruit a team of real life activist, with appropriate web skills. You could pull them together for a training day, equip them with campaign arguments, and an online coordination structure.
One could then invite the team to scour the internet, and especially target media sites, looking for topical issues, where they could put a campaign message across, to counter the assumption that something was a done deal / a good thing (e.g. nuclear power).
The brief wouldn’t be to get drawn into long winded discussions, simply to post and leave. To stir things up, to act in the spirit of true trolldom, and to present a counter point to every argument, to damage those arguments and ensure that nothing could be considered as accepted wisdom, even on the most right wing of webblogs.
One might argue about the morality of training up internet trolls. However rather than paid professionals, if the individuals are volunteers, who are passionate about the issues, and who are simply enjoying a certain amount of leadership, then I think we are safely removed from Exxon paid climate sceptics or the agents of the Chinese state.
And finally a piece of speculation about the ease of constructing online identities. One could argue with oneself on such sites using different email identities (and IP addresses). In an age where social media seems to be the channel of choice for communicating hot news, how hard is it to set up a dozen email addresses, and a dozen associated facebook accounts? – facebook puppets would be the term?
If you need new friends, then it is trivial to sign into a facebook games site, and to adopt lots of game playing friends. With 500+ friends for each of your identities, you could have an audience of 6000+ people for whatever you chose to post. A dozen online activists with a dozen profiles could perhaps access a community of 50,000 through a pattern of shadows, of mirrors and viral activism that perhaps no-one has yet suspected.
The impacts of such activism is perhaps limited only by the time spent developing such identities. Until of course facebook catches on, or collapses under the weight of such artifice.
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