Wednesday December 15th 2010
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Koch-ups and conspiracies
Dec 13th 2010, 19:36 by The Economist online
FOR a moment, they almost had us fooled. It looked very much like a press release from Koch Industries, announcing that the big American conglomerate would stop funding various lobby groups that question the scientific consensus on global warming or oppose laws to curb emissions. Earlier this year Greenpeace issued a report detailing Koch’s aid to such groups, calling it “a financial kingpin of climate-science denial”. The New Yorker followed up with a profile of the company and its owners, the brothers David and Charles Koch, detailing their generous, if discreet, support for these and other right-wing courses. If all this adverse publicity had indeed induced a bout of “climate conscience” in the brothers, it would be quite some story.
But it was a spoof. A well-executed one, mind. The release appeared on Friday on www.koch-inc.com, which one might easily have assumed to be the American conglomerate’s official website. Someone had gone to the trouble of registering and creating this site in the hope that it would convince journalists “checking” the story that it was authentic. By Monday it seemed to have been taken down or blocked, and Google was redirecting searchers to the company’s real homepage.
As far as we know, no news organisation fell for the hoax: the New York Times’s environment blog and a few other websites ran stories noting it as a spoof. But the pranksters could all too easily have scored a hit, as BBC Radio demonstrated last week. It broadcast an interview with a construction worker posing as Mike Crockart, a junior member of Britain’s coalition government, saying he was preparing to resign over the increase in university fees. (In an example of life imitating art, three days later the real Mr Crockart did resign over this issue.)
As the NYT’s blogger notes, the Koch spoof bore the hallmarks of the Yes Men, a group of pranksters whose stated aim is “identity correction”—shaming public figures and corporations by putting out fake press releases in which they own up to their alleged misdeeds and promise to change. Back in 2004 a member of the group was interviewed by BBC World Television, posing as a spokesman for Dow Chemical and promising $12 billion in compensation to the victims of the Bhopal disaster. Several other news organisations wrote up the interview, believing it to be real. The group has set up a hoaxers’ training college, called Yes Lab, to “help progressive groups carry out Yes-Men-style projects on their own”, so it is possible that the Koch Industries spoof was the handiwork of one of their pupils. Other recent targets of the Yes Men’s brand of sarcasm include Apple and Chevron.
It's not easy to be spoof-proof
Although
these big companies no doubt have various legal means to curb the
activities of impostors once they have revealed themselves, it is
difficult and expensive for them to do much to prevent hoaxes in the
first place. Buying up all the plausible alternative addresses for your
company’s official website would be expensive. A quick check on Network Solutions revealed that www.kochindustries.info, www.kochindustry.net, www.koch-inc.biz and all sorts of other variations are still available to be bought. As we recently reported in a piece about internet governance,
the number of website suffixes, and therefore the number of
permutations that companies would need to register to defend their
brands online, has been multiplying.
And that’s before we get on to social media. BPGlobalPR, a bogus Twitter feed that mocks BP’s public-relations response to its Gulf of Mexico spill, has gained over 180,000 followers, about ten times as many as the company’s real Twitter account for America. Surely the real Steve Jobs of Apple cannot be behind this Twitter account (despite its massive 333,000 followers) or this Facebook page. The possibilities for spoofing seem endless.
So far most online corporate hoaxers seem relatively harmless. They are doing nothing worse than satirising companies or just having a bit of fun. But it is not hard to imagine more malign motives: creating a false rumour to profit from manipulating a firm’s share price, for example. So, added to the emerging risk of having their corporate secrets WikiLeaked (or indeed having their websites attacked by hackers in retaliation for cutting their links with WikiLeaks), firms must also now be constantly on the lookout for online impostors. Even if the pranksters’ motives are not malign, they can do companies and their brands a great deal of damage, in no time at all. Now that we’re on internet time, a hoax can travel around the world before the truth has got its boots on. And there’s no guarantee that all those who read or heard about a fake announcement will get to hear that it was in fact a hoax.
Read on: Companies must adapt to a WikiLeaks world where no secret is safe
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Those who are prepared to waste their time for the spoiled brats' pranks are the real suckers in all this hot-air non-sequitur affair.
I can't keep scaring my kids like this. Climate Change was a mistake and everyone I talk to is getting very very angry at this irresponsible fear mongering.
The REAL GREENS are both Liberal and Conservative. We demand:
System Change, not Climate Change.
Love, not windmills.
Courage, not fear.
Love the planet, not SAVE the planet.
Justice to the criminal scientists.
Climate Change Scientists predicting unstoppable warming were just more politicians, but in lab coats. Keep in mind that while politicians can’t be jailed for lying, you lab coat consultants can be and it will most certainly happen. The politicians need enemies and YER IT! You criminal scientists must all be charged with treason for leading the world to war against a non existent enemy of climate change. Climate change was a 3rd World War and justice shall be done not only to the corrupt scientists, but to the news editors and leaders of the environMENTAL groups that threatened our kids with CO2 death warrants for 25 years of wrong predictions.
Scientists and journalists we now know are to science and journalism, what abuse priests were to religion.
A wave of rage from Liberal Climate Change Deniers has arrived. This criminal fear was unsustainable. History has shown that climate change was science’s and Liberalism’s Iraq War of lies and fear mongering. You have all been served.
That's easy to figure out. If you have a news piece that says a corporation has done good, it is a spoof. So if Koch opposes destruction of the earth in the next century, it is a spoof. If Dow chemicals promises to pay more than $100 for every person they killed, that's ridiculous. I don't know how anyone can fall for it.
The Koch brothers growing an environmental awareness, and stop their misinformation campaigning. The thought is hilarious - no wonder the spoof didn't fly.
But seriously. The fact that industry groups or the heads thereof see fit to fund lobby groups to spread disinformation and undermine public understanding of a serious worldwide problem is outrageous. It undermines democracy, which can only function with a well-informed public.
The Koch brothers probably broke no laws and cannot be put behind bars for the damage they do, but at least they can be exposed and shamed. Kudos for The Economist!
A market opportunity here for Verisign: authenticating press releases.
Anyway you look at it. Climate change is for evryone to verify. look at current cold spell in Europe and North America, even India and China.
I am forced to believe that this cold is because of global warming.
Or, to paraphrase another blogger:
Am I out of line to suggest that the likes of the Koch brothers, the criminal lab coat consultants they bribed, pandering politicians, lazy teachers, criminal PR firms and most of all, the irresponsible NEWS EDITORS, should all be rounded up and arrested and charged with treason for leading us to a false war on climate science?
Just read that article about the Kochs in The New Yorker. It makes quite a read. Scary stuff.
It features secretive campaign donations, fake citizens groups and protests, campaigns to discredit science on environmental issues, Americans for Prosperity and other lobby groups paid to agitate against anything that might go against Koch Industries’ business interests, or those of its billionaire owners. How they fund the tea party movement and cynically use it for their own purposes, and much more.
One significant quote: "The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, “respectable elements of society”—intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion." (Lewis Powell, 1971)
Some of the contributors to this forum (see earlier postings) seem to have taken this to heart.
How can anyone yet seriously criticize fake press releases when the Kochs and other special interests are constantly funding fake "grassroots" organizations, fake science and a huge volume of misinformation if not outright lies - unscrupulous special interests have the pranksters clearly and overwhelmingly outnumbered to date.
I'm not sure who is buying this conspiracy theory with the Kochs. I read the piece in the New Yorker a ways back about this and couldn't help thinking over and over..."and???".
No one seems to care when its George Soros contributing but god forbid contributions to libertarian groups.
BTW--the NY'er does not detail fake groups. It talks about funding for groups founded by them, i.e. think tanks, pacs etc. If anyone thinks thats uncommon on the left think again.
It still goes back to "...and". They can't force you to believe what they say unless you do, just like I don't believ the Kos. *Yawn* (eye roll)
The Koch brothers are trying to fake public opinion, so they fully deserve any and every spoofing fallout they get.