Treat the online support for Obama with suspicion:
There's a leaked email that has gotten surprisingly little attention around here. It's the one where AaronBarr discusses his intention to post at DailyKos - presumably something negative about Anonymous, the hacking group. But that's not the email I'm talking about here.
As I also mentioned yesterday, HBGary people are talking about creating "personas", sockpuppets. This isn't new. PR firms have been using fake "people" to promote products and other things for a while now, both online and even in bars & coffee houses.
But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA - whose enemies are labor unions, progressive organizations, journalists, and progressive bloggers, a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet.
According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HBGary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.
In another Word document, one of the team spells out how automation can work so one person can be many personas:
Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that's relevant to the persona. In this case there're specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags. In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas.
It goes far beyond the mere ability for government stooges, corporations or PR firms to hire people to post on sites like HP. They're talking about creating the illusion of consensus. Consensus is a powerful persuader. What has more effect, one guy saying BP isn't at fault or 20 people saying it? For the weakminded, the number can make all the difference.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
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