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Whenever I think of things like your comment I'm reminded of the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi:

    “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

This statement actually comes from Gandhi's grandson Arun and only goes back to 2001.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi

http://www.google.com/search?q=be+the+change+we+wish+to+see+...

(If anyone can find more, speak up - I only googled for a minute.)

Right next to the phrase is a "grandfather Gandhi said". Arun is quoting his grandfather.

That doesn't count as any record that Gandhi said it, especially if the phrase doesn't appear till 2001.

He's most likely paraphrasing his grandfather, which is fine, but also an example of how famous people get smarter and their words pithier as generations go by.

The grandson claims his grandfather said it. While I agree he was never recorded saying that, I am inclined to believe someone who was probably there when he said it.

I don't think this helps much with the problem outlined in the original post. All you need is one guy running this "persona management" software to offset lots of guys refusing to use it.

RyanMcGreal hit the nail on the head with his comment. I made a comment in a different thread about Apples subscription along the lines of how the Internet tends to route round things, which I think may apply here too.

Bear in mind the history of PGP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_in...) as a prime example of this. When Egypt had it's Internet cut off, the Egyptians routed around it. They became the change they wanted to see and Mubarak had to step down.

Given that semi-automated astroturfing is a popular pastime for corporations, having the government astroturfing offers relatively little by way of difference except in certain circumstances where resources become an issue for corporations (e.g. identification). Much of what's proposed already exists elsewhere in the blackhat market anyway.

So how do you fight it? If you care enough about it, any way you can. Disinformation is as old as the hills. Exposing it is one way, discrediting the source is another, counterdisinformation yet another still. Not participating in places where known or suspected personas exist is probably best. For the truly organised group of today (and for the casual group of tomorrow) there's darknets and offline means of communication.

I believe it does.

How? Let's say the change you want to see is a thoughtful, reasoning approach to communication. Your actions are posting on this website, or some like-minded friend's communication channels.

Your actions result in a thoughtful community that has spent a lot of time analyzing itself- which means people know each other and have meaningful interactions.

Now, when a jerk tries to artificially influence the group, he isn't playing the same game, because your personal actions have created a buffer to it.

Being the change you want to see goes beyond not doing something you find abhorrent. It also entails actively resisting what you find abhorrent - drawing attention to it, organizing against it, providing positive alternatives to it, and so on.

I try to adhere to that motto. I really do.

Sadly I had to learn that it very often conflicts with "making a living".

The internet is really many superimposed communities. Expecting the internet, or pretty much anything else to be a certain way is setting yourself up for unfulfilled expectation.

The internet is a rapidly changing place and filled with enormous diversity of people, views and interests.

don't whine or fight. create the world you want to live in.

the internet doesn't work one way or another. people on the internet work one way or another. you don't like how some groups are working, don't work with them. work another way. everyone has a choice. i know it can seem overwhelming when a lot of people choose to work one way that doesn't seem right, but don't let it get you down. you have a choice too, and you don't have to work the same way they do. work a different way.

Honestly, it works fine for me, and although I find the actions described in this story to be a hilarious and unethical waste of resources, they certainly aren't making my Internet any worse in a general sense.

What do I give a crap about some sockpuppet content ghostwritten by a Fed -- since when am I reading the comments on Daily Kos, or some random dude's Twitter? Who cares what articles people vote on? I spend most of my online time reading an incrementally updated newsmagazine of my personal favorite writers on the planet via RSS.

Are you concerned about undue influence on public opinion? The only people being swayed or convinced by some sockpuppet campaign are those whose opinion is already made of shit. Do you really think that J. Random Congressman or Alfred E. Media Representative would be likely to have a sane, rational opinion on the issues of the day anyway? A couple dozen or hundred automated propaganda-bots are not likely to make his decisions even worse.

There's no reason to care about how the winners are picked. The cool thing about the Internet is that there's room for everyone, and that doesn't seem to be changing at all. That is the right system, and we're already there.

> The only people being swayed or convinced by some sockpuppet campaign are those whose opinion is already made of shit.

Social proof is a studied, verified effect, where people's opinions are shaped by the opinions of others at a subconscious level.

Do you hate laugh tracks? Me too. But research shows that people think shows are funnier with the laugh track than without, even if they say they hated the laugh track.

Are you annoyed by every brand saying they're "The Leading X" or "The Number 1 Y"? Me too. But marketing which includes these claims leads to higher sales than marketing without.

When I was a sales puke, I applied this principle to selling add-on insurance for car rentals. I identified a point in my pitch where I could add the words, "almost everybody takes the package". That's all, that's it. In the week when I first applied it, it added almost 10% to my rate of sale and the improvement persisted when I retained those words.

And I was dealing with all walks of life. Holiday makers of all kinds. From backpackers, to CEOs of german industrial giants, to law-school professors from leading US universities, they were all affected by the truthful claim that almost everybody bought the package from me.

Social proof works.

> And I was dealing with all walks of life. Holiday makers of all kinds. From backpackers, to ... they were all affected by the truthful claim that almost everybody bought the package from me.

Wow, everybody falls for the pitch? Gee, I guess I'm convinced that social proof works.

Not everybody. But my percentage hovered between 90% and 95% for two years in a row and I was regularly in the top three in Australia.

I don't doubt it. I was just tickled by how the evidence that social proof works echoed the use of social proof.

I'm so meta, "I'm so meta".

Quite aside from that, these people are Federal Government contractors, meaning that they're using people's tax money to do this.

Do you hate laugh tracks? Me too. But research shows that people think shows are funnier with the laugh track than without, even if they say they hated the laugh track.

Why is "more funny" the goal? What's wrong with just "funny"?

The social proof may be true, but so what. I would enjoy my life more if all I ate was candy and ice cream every day. For a few months, anyway...

The sad fact in the U.S. is that it isn't the people with thoughtful consistent opinions on important issues that have real impact on the politicians that get sent to Washington to tackle current problems. It is instead the easily swayed fickle "undecideds" that determine the powers that be.

This state of affairs makes the tools in this article extremely disturbing in the context of government contractors.

iuguy's Gandhi quote may be the best response, but I have something more verbose to say.

Popularity is powerful. Anything that matters is going to be dominated by popularity in some form. Politics, fast food, movies, etc, are all in the state they are due to winning popularity contests. The internet is just late to the party. The cool internet that agreed with your values just happened to be visible for the first few decades of its existence because you were the right demographic. However it was inevitable that sooner or later the public at large would get a whiff of how cool the net was, and pretty soon money comes into the equation, and it's all downhill.

But in reality the cool internet is bigger today than it ever was before, it's just obscured by all the spammy, sock-puppetry, pointless-celebrity-tweeting bullshit that you've come to expect. It's easy to fall into the trap that you need to compete with that, but you don't. Popularity is good for business, but it doesn't feed your soul. If you do really great work, the people who pay attention it will appreciate it immensely. There are bloggers who I believe contribute more to the world (at least my world) than Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Williams even though I use Facebook and Twitter every day.

Everything is on the internet. What is the internet? I think we are talking of specific views we take of the internet. Like if we mostly visit sites through HN, we have the HN view of the internet.

So if anything, we can say the views are failing us.

Ironic that you express this viewpoint here - online, in a small community with extremely high signal-to-noise, where sockpuppetry could easily be discovered.

The people who care about quality conversation will find places like this - and the rest of the people never mattered anyway.

Never forget that people "outside" and people on internet are, in the end, always the same people.

"But the wisdom part begins to look like mob rule and crowds can be easily gamed, as this article shows."

How does this article show that? I'm not arguing that they cannot be, I'm merely pointing out that the article doesn't 'show' that. Its not the subject.

Without a 50kiloword post it's difficult to fully respond to your complaints.

However, I will say this, which I hope will help. Often times it is difficult to get a cohesive understanding of the changes caused by technological change without the distance of history or an external perspective. Change is chaotic in the short term, and it can be difficult for any individual human who is compromised by biases, limited knowledge, and an undue focus on the very immediate past and very immediate proximity to extract meaningful information about long term change from that muddle. More so when those long term changes are rather subtle (as they often are). More so when only an observer from the future who has had the benefit of immersive familiarity with what in the present are novel paradigms would be able to look at our time and pick out the teeniest inklings of those changes. To us those new things are still new things, and not even fully formed yet, and thus all the more difficult to define, understand, and recognize.

Moreover we have a natural desire for change to manifest rapidly and completely. We want everything to be resolved utterly in the 5th act of a 2 hour play. But that's not how things work in the real world. In the real world it's always 2 steps forward, 1 step back, and then 1 forward and 2 back, and then 2 forward and 1 back again. Slow, incremental, subtle progress, often too slow, incremental, and subtle to be very satisfying. Worse yet, advances such as the present one (exposing previously secret underhanded schemes to the public at large) may seem like setbacks, because even though the result is greater transparency (forcefully made) in the process something bad was exposed.

In short, I don't think it's possible for anyone to fully understand the changes that are going on in the world (or even in the US) right now, let alone to forecast how those and other changes will manifest years and decades down the road.

I do think we are at a turning point in history at the moment. I think we will either tip into a period of greater individual liberty, richer freedoms of expression, greater individual autonomy, etc. on the one hand or we will tip into a period of diminished individual liberty, more authority in the hands of the state and big organizations (corporations, unions, NGOs, etc.), and a de facto division of hierarchy of rights between a new effective aristocracy and commoners. However, I think it is far, far too early to say which way the scales will tip, and there are promising signs that it will tip in the direction of liberty.

Consider this story in and of itself. Sure, there were nefarious plans for "sock puppet management", but not only do we have no clue how well such things would have worked in practice (I'm skeptical) but the plans have been spilled all over the internet for the world to gawk at, which will likely cause a huge backlash against anyone attempting to do this sort of thing as well as keep people on the lookout for instances of the phenomenon.

a de facto division of hierarchy of rights between a new effective aristocracy and commoners

Y'know, that has to be the only outcome that can be an object of fear - and yet, I just can't help thinking that there is so much in our cultural history that would subvert that as soon as it became at all overt.

The only reason they haven't sparked significant backlash is that people can still imagine they're not commoners under a jackboot. What will happen when that state change comes about? What happens when the sleeping people wake up?