cybersoc.com

teaching an old post new tricks: netvocates again

I always find it strange how a post that's several months old can suddenly get a link from a big site and go bonkers with traffic.

Remember a few months back when I started posting about Netvocates, the company that willfully uses B.I.A.S. ["Blog Intelligence and Advocacy Service" - I kid you not] as it's acronym. (I'll link to all the posts I've tagged with Netvocates but, as they're in the business of Astrotufing, I'm not going to link directly to them from this post.)

When I first blogged it, the post got some links from some busy blogs (Daily Kos, Pandagon and others), which were then linked to by lots of smaller sites, and then reblogged by lots of people on livejournal and by forum users. A couple months later, the whole thing was revived with a link from Feministe and traffic spiked up again.

Today it's round three with a link from Crooks and Liars sending upwards of a thousand visitors to that post about Netvocates from way back in May.

netvocates (4): tying some details together

Deconsumption has made another excellent post in follow-up, and furtherance, of the netvocates thing. I followed a link to a post about "anti-network neutrality astroturfing comment spam" on The Abstract Factory. Commentors there reckon that a person calling themselves "Stevens33" and another going by the name of "Net Chick" are going around posting suspicious comments. You'll find one from Stevens33, on a post about net neutrality, on danablankenhorn's blog.

Another blog, a bit tasty, posted about net neutrality and ended up in awe of the response: "look at all this boom and chat on my little blog. I will comment on all of your comments soon." Guess who was amongst the suddenly appearing commentors?: Stevens33 and NetChick (see 17 May 8.29pm and 8.40pm). Both Stevens33 and NetChick can also be seen on ipdemocracy commenting on a thread about, you guessed it, net neutrality.

Now it may just be that these are two mates who travel around, posting in agreement as they go along. But I'd be quite interested to see, from the owners of those blogs, what IP addresses were registered and whether they noticed, about the time, a visit from netvocates? They usually visit via:

http://arrca.netvocates.com/Default/index.cfm

and/or

http://192.***.*.***/jcs/watch.daa?sessionid=-1359069044&pagenum=

(I didn't show the whole address but it will be familiar if you've had a visit)

Have you had a visit from one of these AND a post from one of the commentors above, or a strange post that you've got the IP address for? Read on...

Netvocates is a Comcast customer in New Hampshire. As with any ISP, I'm sure that Comcast would be happy to shut down the account of any customer who violates the terms and conditions of the service. I draw your attention to the following terms of Comcast's Acceptable Use Policy:

ii) [it is against the acceptable use policy to] transmit unsolicited bulk or commercial messages or "spam" in violation of law This includes, but is not limited to, unsolicited advertising, promotional materials or other solicitation material, bulk mailing of commercial advertising, chain mail, informational announcements, charity requests, and petitions for signatures;

xiii) [it is against the acceptable use policy to] send numerous copies of the same or substantially similar messages, empty messages, or messages which contain no substantive content, or send very large messages or files to a recipient that disrupts a server, account, newsgroup, or chat service;

as well as...

xvii) (participate in the collection of e-mail addresses, screen names, or other identifiers of others (without their prior consent), a practice sometimes known as spidering or harvesting, or participate in the use of software (including "spyware") designed to facilitate this activity;

xviii) collect responses from unsolicited messages;

xix) (impersonate any person or entity, engage in sender address falsification, forge anyone else's digital or manual signature, or perform any other similar fraudulent activity;

xxii) collect, or attempt to collect, personal information about third parties without their consent;

Get in touch if you've come across anything interesting that might help. Or make the complaint yourself (the the pulldown that says "sales/promotional offer inquiry" has an option for "report internet service abuse").

[see my other posts about netvocates]

netvocates: IP addresses and screenshots

Daily Kos has picked up on the posts (original post / follow-up) I recently made about Netvocates, sending a load of traffic my way and giving me an idea.

I haven't noticed any suspicious comments on cybersoc.com, but some of the people who have commented here or blogged this elsewhere reckon they've been comment spammed by Netvocates "activists and consumers who share the client’s views". Why don't those of you who think they've been posting in your comments hook up and swap some IP addresses? Normally I'd facilitate this but I just don't have the time at the moment - maybe Blanton and Ashton, who posted that they'd had "conservative comments in numbers unusual for this little website" would be a good starting point, as would Words, Not Fists (where the man behind netvocates has posted a rebuttal to suggestiongs that netvocates might have stopped by for a visit to his second ever post which just so happened to be about the Al Gore movie). In the time it took me to write the above, I also spotted similar allegations of organised comment spam, possibly originating at netvocates, on feministe.us - and links back to a post on Pandagon discussing strange comment spam.

Of course, we might all just be paranoid, as this comment over on feministe.us suggests - so why don't those of you who think you've had some visits from netvocates or similar firms swap some IP addresses for those commentors. If they match up, we're maybe on to something.

some related news

I've just noticed a link from the excellent deconsumption post about Netvocates pointing to this post by Anonymous Blogger who has a screen shot showing what netvocates saw when their system gleaned his page looking for the words "coke" and "fat tax", which are clearly highlighted. If Anonymous Blogger has indeed found what he/she thinks they've found, then netvocates certainly isn't very good at hiding their tracks (indeed, leaving a referring URL behind - which is what kicked off my initial investigation - isn't exactly stealthy) they aren't likely to have managed to cover their IP address tracks either.

[see my other posts about netvocates]

return to the netvocates thing

A few nights ago I posted here about this blog having been visited by NetVocates. Little did I know, when I did, that quite a few others would suddenly pop out of the woodwork and do their own sleuthing and the debate about "paid for trolling" would start to spread.

See the post and 26 comments on Deconsumption, UtahAdventureVideos asking Chip if he can name some clients, and this forum discussion over at NobleRealms.

I think a lot of bloggers share my concern about the idea of people being paid to post, even if they're only being paid to post about, as Chip says in his reply to my original post: "ask [their] activists to only engage on issues they actually believe in. Second, [NetAdvocates] ask everyone not to lie about anything. Third, [they] ask [their] activists not to create multiple online personalities to engage in blogosphere conversations."

And that's where the apology comes in. I originally misread this rebuttal and gave Mr. Griffin, the guy behind NetVocates and CustomScoop, an easy ride. Having re-read the post following LOTS of inbound traffic relating to the post and from NetVocates itself, I'm feeling a bit quesy again - paying someone to post is paying for trolling, anyway you look at it. Thanks villageblog for the investigative work, and excellent post, you made on this matter. You've moved the debate about netvocates (and other online sockpuppet services) forward...

[see my other posts about netvocates]

behind netvocates (and it's link to customscoop)

I was looking at inbound links this evening and came across one originating behind the firewall of a company called NetVocates which is a "blog intelligence and advocacy service". The website blurb says, reasonably enough:

"...blogs frequently impact an organization and its products and image in uncontrolled and often unexpected ways. In addition, the sheer volume of blogs, message boards, and other discussion forums makes it difficult for organizations to effectively monitor the activity relevant to them."

Organisations want to know what people are saying about them online - that makes perfect sense. However, I spent a bit more time on the NetVocates site and found this:

"NetVocates then recruits activists and consumers who share the client’s views in order to reinforce those key messages on targeted blogs – and rebut misinformation when appropriate."

So they hire sockpuppets to go out and pretend to be "ordinary users" when they post stuff on blogs? ANYONE THINKING OF HIRING A COMPANY TO DO THIS needs to think very seriously about the backlash that's likely to happen if people find out. Don't believe me? Then see this post about a company that tried it and got caught.

Other bloggers who have found themselves visited by NetVocates include:

PSoTD
Make Chai, Not War
CracksInTheFacade
pandora's jar of mixed nuts

What do each of these have in common? Well, based on a very brief visit to each, I'd say they all discuss political issues at least some of the time. On my visits, Pandora's was discussing nuclear power plants in Australia, Cracks most recent post was about American troops in Iraq but the following post had a link to an article about energy, MakeChai describes himself as a "Pakistani American Muslim... human rights and responsibilities advocate..." and PSoTD has a "leftie blog" badge on his site and reckons the netvocate people visited this page about the Al Gore movie. I also just found this guy who posted about Net Neutrality on the day he was visited.

I'm starting to worry...

So who are they? Well, a search of the whois database on network solutions, where they registered their domain name late last year, found that the owners are Griffin Strategy Group, LLC who list an email address at eoutreach.com as their contact and a non-sense contact phone number of 999 999 9999. Searching based on the listed zipcode + "Griffin" I found this page which seamingly ties netvocate to a profile on iKarma for Chip Griffin, Chief Innovation Officer at CustomScoop, a trademark of "eOutreach Solutions, LLC". Which leads me to a biography of Chip who also has his own blog here. Customschoop has actually been featured in TechCrunch and in this post on Micro Persuasion who, I reckon, don't have a clue that Chip is also involved in a company like NetVocates.

So returning to the whole who is Chip Griffin question, a quick google search throws up lots of stuff. He seems to write a lot of stuff of interest to Republican candidates, congressman, etc and his own blog says: "Griffin worked for a variety of politicians, think tanks, and public relations firms in the Washington, D.C. area. In addition, he headed townhall.com, a conservative internet portal." I won't embarrass the guy by telling you he used to be into knifemaking and castle wolfenstien...

So do people out there know that the guy behind NetVocates, a service that watches blogs and message boards then hires "activists and consumers who share the client’s views in order to reinforce those key messages on targeted blogs" is also the guy behind CustomScoop, a service that's getting some kudos in the blogosphere? Somehow I think people haven't noticed - what blogger would talk up a service that has a sister service that, basically, pays people to post comment spam?!

There's still some room for a bit of sleuthing around this... have you been visited by NetVocates? What was your content about? Maybe you've been approached to "blog" or "comment" by them? Let's find out more.

---

Update 22:52 BST: It looks like cracksinthefacade and PSoTD both posted about the Al Gore movie, as did the Pandora's jar guy - so someone has paid to find out what people are saying about the Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Did you post about the film? Did you get inbound links from NetVocates? More interestingly, did any user comments appear and what did they say? Let's see if any feedback posted looks similar...

Update 18.22 BST 06/01/06: Chip has posted a bit of info on his blog in response to this and posts made by other bloggers. One paragraph of it, if true and I have no reason to doubt that it is, makes me feel quite a lot better about the idea of NetVocate asking people to post comments (see my other post - I've since changed my mind about that). Chip says: We have a few basic principles we ask all of our staff and the activists we work with to operate under. First, we ask our activists to only engage on issues they actually believe in. Second, we ask everyone not to lie about anything. Third, we ask our activists not to create multiple online personalities to engage in blogosphere conversations.

[see my other posts about netvocates]

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