By Michael Lusk
This is an article I submitted to OEN on Thursday, 28 May 2009. Rob rejected it on the grounds that it was posted as a comment on his diary about the COTO bans - which was how I came to hear about the COTO bans. In the mistaken belief that the targets of Rob's crackdown included corporate agents threatening prominent OEN authors such as Linn Cohen-Cole, my article cites Monsanto's abuse of OEN accounts as evidence that the "banning technology" referred Rob's OEN Member Update lacks the effect he claims for it. In the circumstances, the best place to publish the article is here. Appended to the article itself is my ensuing mail correspondence with Rob. I include the correspondence in accordance with the OEN principle that the comments complete the article.
If it has any effect at all, OEN's policy of blocking accounts that post abusive comments can at most be expected to give a superficial impression of increased civility in the OEN forum. Contrary to what Rob wrote in today's Member Update, it will not crack down on the "crew of unpleasant, negative commenters who attack just about every article published, particularly ones by higher visibility writers".
The basic difficulty is that OEN's editors have power to regulate accounts, but not persons. Banning an account has no significance when the person behind the account can simply create more accounts to communicate the same message. The difficulty is analogous to that of piercing the corporate veil in recovery of civil damages.
Here's a recent example. I've commented several times on the hydra-like persona of the Monsanto public affairs man, Brad Mitchell, at OEN. On or about the date Brad Mitchell registered his "Brad Mitchell" account, several other accounts were registered, the only activity of which has been to comment approvingly on Monsanto "articles" and/or to cross-support commentary in favour of Monsanto. Some of these accounts showed no activity at all until several months after they were created. It appears that at the beginning of Monsanto's recent OEN campaign, Brad Mitchell created many accounts for symphonic effect, aiming to create a false impression of broad public support. My comments are quoted below.
Reply: And Simon Barber is his new lapdog
Wherever Brad Mitchell goes at OpEdNews, there's a reader close at hand to approve his communication of Monsanto propaganda. This time it's brand new OpEdNews member Simon Barber (username Ttroglodytes).
Welcome to your first day of OpEdNews membership, Simon. No biography appears for your profile yet. You do seem to have a special affection for GM apologists Brad Mitchell and Robert Wager. Like Brad Mitchell, the GM-propagandist Robert Wager is little respected in this community. Yet his many comments have drawn three registrations of approval. It turns out that two of them are be found on this page and come from you.
Are you paid by Monsanto, too?
Where's Monsanto's PR man Brad Mitchell?
Brad Mitchell at Monsanto is waiting and seeing before commenting in his own name.
Instead we hear from "Jim Johnson", one of the numerous OpEdNews accounts which appear to be virtual personalities under Monsanto's control. "Jim Johnson" registered at OpEdNews four weeks ago. The "biography" associated with the account says "Love sports...an avid Missouri Tigers fan". Incongruously, "Jim's" only activity at OpEdNews has been to criticise - or in this case merely to cast unsupported doubt upon - Barbara Peterson's articles criticising Monsanto.
Monsanto appears to maintain quite a collection of bogus accounts which pop up like so many GM-seeds at OpEdNews. Some of them, such as the "vincent trevisanutto" ("Ph.D. Molecular Genetics") account, post comments, which Brad Mitchell then expressly praises or clickingly approves. Others, such as "topher74" aka "Chris P" (no bio), just clickingly approve Brad Mitchell's or fellow virtual personalities' comments in favour of Monsanto. By a remarkable coincidence, the "topher74" aka "Chris P" account was created on exactly the same day as Brad Mitchell's "own" account. The "vincent trevisanutto" account was created one day earlier.
When asked whether they are paid by Monsanto or are pseudonyms for Brad Mitchell, these virtual personalities resort to the same stony silence Brad Mitchell relies upon when directly asked: "Don't your seeds spread and contaminate non-GMO fields?
Thus, the "Jim Johnson" account itself can be seen as an expression the same obfuscatory argument the company pleads: that Monsanto isn't really Monsanto.
In a way, it's true. Like the influenza virus, Monsanto has been lysed, spliced and recombined to be more pernicious and virulent than ever before. Now it's an "agricultural company" that ingests IP rights and excretes liabilities, killing farmers and consumers in the process.
In my view, this kind of planned strategy is far more destructive of community, discourse and debate than the use of offensive language or blatantly obvious ad hominem attacks. Yet there is practically nothing OEN can do about it. At most the conduct can be exposed after - perhaps long after - it has occurred.
In the end, OEN can't do much more than bowdlerise by filtering out posts which include scheduled "bad" words". Within limits, it's reasonable to do that. The experience of reading at OEN will probably not be much impoverished if posts including character strings such as "f*ck you!" are automatically blocked. But it's no use pretending that blocking accounts will block the people behind the accounts.
The price of an open online society is spam and content which some will find offensive. The reason there is so much spam is that enough people respond to it to make it worth spammers' commercial while to continue spamming. Minority voices occupy less bandwidth, but tend to be more resilient because they are driven by inner necessity rather than commercial gain. In a networked environment, centralised control of these phenomena is infeasible. Only a massively decentralised solution - in which all users freely decide resolutely to ignore spam and offensive content - has any prospects of success. That assumes individual moral development which, although not yet widespread, is already established and growing.
Conclusion: in an open forum, spam and offensive content cannot effectively be handled as a content issue. End users must resolve it for themselves by applying their own filters. OEN can best help by supplying tools enabling members to set filters for themselves.
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Comments on the unpublished article - Mail correspondence with Rob
Rob's editorial response. Saturday, 30-05-2009
Sorry, but we're going to pass on this article.
You submitted an article titled:
Restricting Abusive Commenters at OEN
This article was submitted with category OpEdNews_Op_Eds and tags Argument, Civility, Community, Community, Individualism, Individualism, Monsanto, Propaganda, Spam
Op Ed News Administrator
P.S. this was posted as a comment on my diary. That's where it will get attention and where it should be. And you are wrong. Sometimes it takes a bit of effort, but our banning technology does work. rob kall
My reply.
To: Rob Kall
From: Michael Lusk
Sent: Saturday, May 30, 2009 11:26:02 AM
Hi Rob
I got your rejection slip, thanks.
My article submission did not refer to your diary of 29 May (promoted to headline) discussing your controversy with Rady and COTO. As its opening sentence clearly states, my article submission refers to your Member Update of the same date. It deals with much broader issues, particularly including corporate manipulation of public opinion. It would be irrelevant to append it as a comment to your personal controversy.
You're blowing in the wind with your "banning technology". Cheney likewise claims that his robust interrogation techniques "work". In a sense it's true. They do produce results - though not the results he claims. At least your banning technology is more or less harmless in itself. Providing a simulacrum of civility is benign. What is problematic are the grander claims you make for it.
Even though you're wrong on this point, OEN is and remains a credit to you. Keep up the good work.
Best regards
Michael Lusk
Rob's response.
Date Sent: 05/31/2009
Subject: banning tech
Message:
maybe I mixed you up with another posting.
Fortunately, so far, our banning technology HAS worked.
WE haven't had someone crazy enough to aggressively go after us from multiple IPs. THe worst case took about 8 IPs of banning to get rid of. He's a racist, mysogynist antisemite now posting on the coto site.
Rob Kall
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P.S. Am I the only one who cannot immediately identify the "racist, mysogynist antisemite" who is posting here? Particularly if it is obvious, this is surely the place to point it out!
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