I feel like the internet is becoming an increasingly dangerous place, and subtly so.
How come the combination of internet and activism is suddenly "dangerous", and not the pervasive and misleading propaganda we've been subjected to for generations?
Shell can no longer drown out the opposition with millions of dollars and now it's a problem?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/13/corporates...
http://www.care2.com/causes/shell-tries-to-greenwash-frackin...
Shell had responded to the challenge that the accepted definition of the phrase "sustainable development" was "development which meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".
Is that definition highly controversial now?
In any event, that certainly does not constitute a massive propaganda campaign against the public.
Well it depends how much they spent on it no? I'd guess that Shell spends vastly more on putting it's point of view across than Greenpeace is able to.
I tried googling for some example campaigns, but I couldn't find any examples. I would assume it would almost be impossible to do so in the age of the Internet, reddit, facebook, and twitter. Do you have any examples of Shell drowning out environmentalist groups like Greenpeace?
For the record, this was also a top google result about a 2011 advertised claim being thrown out as misleading. http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2011/10/19/shell-ads-banned-ov... Not that it says much, I'm sure I can find instances of every multibillion dollar company lying (as well as Greenpeace and PETA).
It's about as honest a debate as a soviet election where all other political parties are banned.
It's perfectly legal to mislead, confuse, shade, distort, bamboozle, trick, and distract. And you can lie outright if the lie is small. Or if it qualifies as puffery, which basically the kind of lie we have come to expect from people selling stuff.
For example, Shell can say "We care about the environment" and show pictures of frolicking wildlife. They aren't obligated to say, "but we care about profits more" and show some pictures of oil spills.
My favorite example is Airborne, a purported cold preventative that does precisely nothing. They lied in their advertisements for years and made fistfuls of money. After more than a decade somebody finally sued them, and eventually the FTC beat them down as well. The result is that they had to give some of their ill-gotten gains back, and now lie by implication rather than by direct false statements.
But that only happened because a) they were provably wrong, and b) they had enough money for class action lawyers to decide it was worth years of effort to take a whack at their money pinata. As long as your lie isn't provably costing money and provably false, you're basically golden.
Photochopped some ads, hosted them, put up a website, made a fake twitter account. Made fun of a company's brand by pointing out the downplayed environmental cost.
Yes, very different.
The dangers of the mob are very real though, as many people's lives have been ruined (or nearly ruined) through some misinformation that goes viral.
On the brighter side, there's quite a few exposés that we now witness that would have never seen the light of day otherwise (or would have been relegated to B-theaters, flea markets, and mail-order catalogs).
What we need is a more efficient legal process for online statements that cross the line into defamation, and better collaborative filtering (the whole point of sites like reddit is that the truth should out).
I am sorry but a LOT of the big, influential NGOs are very guilty of that and of abusing polemic and demagogy. They seem to think their generally just causes/ideals justify almost all means. Sometimes they are more clever to play their cards right like in this case, sometimes they do a really terrible job and it backfires like when they attacked Apple over the completely made-up energy consumption of a shared hosting facility. But either way they are and always have been consciously using rhetoric means to manipulate people or to at least be heard. This is nothing new - haven't you ever been stopped by them in the streets when they are trying to sign you up for monthly donations? The tactics they are using there are nothing short of slimy car salesmen and ripe with psychological mind-frakks. This is nothing the internet allowed to happen, it has always been there. But the "good old days" when mostly techs were using the web and when the general signal-to-noise-ratio was better are over.