Internet Plague: Paid Shills in Comments
November 27th, 2011See, Undercover Researchers Expose Chinese Internet Water Army for more.
Via: BBC:
Trust in information on the web is being damaged by the huge numbers of people paid by companies to post comments online, say researchers.
Fake posters can “poison” debate and make people unsure about who they can trust, the study suggests.
Some firms have created tens of thousands of fake accounts to flood chat forums and skew debate.
The researchers say there are reliable ways to spot fakes and urge websites to do more to police users.
The researchers from Canada and China say paying people to post comments is an “interesting strategy in business marketing” but it is not a benign activity.
“Paid posters may create a significant negative effect on the online communities, since the information from paid posters is usually not trustworthy,” they wrote.
Research Credit: noncompliant
See, e.g. GLP.
GLP is a very interesting special case.
Search: godlikeproductions (banned words OR Jason Lucas)
But never mind all of that. The fact that Sucha Fool stories are routinely pinned over there speaks volumes about the overall credibility of the place.
Once again, my eyes are opened.
this really is rampant, and disturbing, but simultaneously totally unsurprising.
i find it so… weird… that even on obscure, nowhere, no-reader blogs it’s apparent that fake posters are commenting. sometimes without even bothering to include a link back to whatever company is paying them.
i have found a LOT of this (intuitively) on places like online shopping sites and whatnot. fake positive reviews for crappy products abound.
can’t trust anything on teh internets! same as always 😛