"Their voice. Amplified." or Why I’m banning 151.200.70.* comments
Posted by Thomas Nephew on August 22nd, 2006
I got curious the other day about a comment left some time ago at this blog. I won’t identify it, so that I can discuss the the IP address it traced to without revealing an identity that perhaps shouldn’t be revealed — and without leveling a precise charge that can’t yet be supported. Suffice it to say a political opinion was involved, as is of course the case for most comments here.
Haloscan — the comment service for this blog — permanently records IP addresses of published comments, and site owners can examine them with the “Manage Comments” utility. In addition, I’ve built the SiteMeter script into the comment code. Together, this gives me a chance to quickly learn about commenters and, when necessary, report spammers or ban unwanted commenters. In this case, the IP address — 151.200.70.X (I know but won’t say the final block number) — turned out to be registered to
DEMOCRACY DATA & COMMUNICATIONS, LLC
1029 North Royal Street, Suite 200
Alexandria, VA 22314-1542
US
Interesting name — so I tried to learn more about it. And lo and behold, Democracy, Data & Communications (henceforth DDC) is in the astroturfing business — or, as the Wikipedia entry on the subject puts it:
…formal public relations projects which deliberately seek to engineer the impression of spontaneous, grassroots behavior.
Serving Democracy…
A defunct “Rational Grounds” post preserved by Teresa Nielsen Hayden once noted DDC’s involvement in sotto voce Bush administration P.R. campaigns for its Medicare and “No Child Left Behind” education initiatives — the latter famously blowing up on the front pages with the Armstrong Williams “paid shill” story:
An internet campaign was also mounted through Democracy, Data & Communications, a company with a breathtaking record in the astroturf world. A quick WHOIS/nslookup investigation turned up oodles of DDC fronts. [detailed list to follow] Their client list is also pretty impressive.
Yes, it is: Edelman Public Affairs Worldwide, (which has Wal-Mart as a client), BellSouth, Verizon, ClearChannel, Merck, Monsanto, Microsoft… the list goes on and on. Motto: “Your Voice. Amplified.”
More interesting yet was a DailyKos article by “leveymg” sharing what he learned investigating a Craig’s List Help Wanted ad for “OnPoint Advocacy,” which turns out to be a DDC affiliate. Kudos to the Washington Post’s Jeffrey Birnbaum for much of the information in this post; his September 15, 2005 “For Online Advocates, Click Here” article provides a lot of excellent background:
It’s hard to imagine two issues of less interest to most voters than free trade with Central America and a cut in the tax on dividends paid to the owners of stock
Yet the latest in lobbyists’ wiles — a grand elaboration on Internet advertising — managed to rope hundreds of thousands of average Americans into the congressional debate on both matters and was instrumental in passing the measures into law
The until-now unheralded trick-of-trade was bankrolled by the Business Roundtable — an organization of chief executives from 160 large companies — and was executed by Alexandria-based Democracy Data & Communications LLC and its OnPoint Advocacy affiliate. It worked so well that the Roundtable is experimenting with it as a way to revive President Bush’s foundering effort to make private accounts part of Social Security
“It’s the future of lobbying,” said John J. Castellani, president of the Roundtable.
I can’t know at this point whether my commenter was (1) a regular citizen somehow tagged with the DDC IP address as he/she was forwarded to my site, (2) a DDC employee who just happened to surf to my site that day, or (3) a DDC employee involved in cruising targeted web sites and leaving comments* — perhaps (4) a so-called “Advocacy Coordinator,” the position “leveymg” found an ad for:
Advocacy Coordinators
Exciting start-up, grassroots firm currently has openings for Advocacy Coordinators working in house or from home. In this position you will be working with a team of dedicated professionals doing issue-based advocacy work; educating, organizing and mobilizing grassroots advocates by phone and e-mail. Ideal candidates will be highly motivated, politically minded individuals with outstanding communication skills, both written and verbal, who thrive in a campaign style work environment. A strong interest in and working knowledge of politics and public affairs are essential. Campaign experience strongly preferred.
The latter two possibilities — call it the “paid shill” theory — are more disturbing to me, but even the first one — call it the “astroturf grass blade” theory — would illustrate that Margaret Mead was more right than she knew when she said “Never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world when they’ve got millions of dollars worth of IT services to play with.” (Or something like that.) As the idealists at OnPoint — IP address 151.200.70.61 — put it:
OnPoint Advocacy understands how difficult it can be to generate the amount and quality of support you need, especially within tight timeframes or on specialized issues. That’s why we often turn to the Web to help our clients quickly build high-volume support for a campaign.
….the Astroturf way
In his DailyKos post, “leveymg” also saved some of the key parts of a second “Rational Grounds” post about DDC (emphases added):
Democracy Data & Communcations is a big player in the astroturf community. They host the website for the Grass Roots Roundtable, and they co-chair it with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The board of directors is a regular Who’s Who of American industry. They’re a big player at the Public Affairs Council, and they’ve earned a reputation as the place to go for astroturf campaigns.
I came across DDC in October of last year, when they were putting pop-up ads against John Edwards in AOL Instant Messenger. This was for their The Truth About Trial Lawyers site for the November Fund (warning: slow to load). The November Fund was a tort-reform astroturf campaign bought and paid for by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. … A quick google on their name brought up their site, and a May 2004 post by Mark Kleiman on a very similar campaign on behalf of No Child Left Behind.
However, it wasn’t until I started noodling around their DNS that things really got interesting. Punching in the domain name at DNSStuff.com gave me the IP address 151.200.70.81 for http://supportnclb.com (defunct now, try the Way Back Machine). A WHOIS lookup on this showed me it was indeed owned by DDC, and that they owned the whole 151.200.70.* netblock. Hmm. Finally, I did a reverse-DNS lookup on the IP…
and hit paydirt. Sadly, only some of it is preserved in the DailyKos post, but it gives you the idea:
151.200.70.81 voteforcontracting.com
151.200.70.81 voteforcontracting.org
151.200.70.81 voteforflorida.com
151.200.70.81 voteforflorida.org
151.200.70.81 voteforfranchising.com
151.200.70.81 voteforgeorgewbush.com
151.200.70.81 voteforphilanthropy.com
151.200.70.81 voteforsmallbusiness.com
151.200.70.81 voteforsmallbusiness.net
151.200.70.81 voteforsmallbusiness.org …
(Emphasis in original.) The current list for that particular block appears to be smaller now, and appears to change periodically — or maybe the “dnsstuff.com” utility for looking at that block only gets a random dozen or so at a time, I’m no expert on this kind of thing.
At any rate, as of the other evening 151.200.70.81 is the IP address for votefornuclear.com, voteforthemeritshop.com (builders association twist on “open shop”), ustvotes.com (UST tobacco corporation voting site) and other organizations that generally funnel interested parties towards a voteforbusiness.com Chamber of Commerce mothership.** One that doesn’t is is the Social Security “reform” group compasscoalition.com (Coalition for the Modernization and Protection of America’s Social Security), which asserts
The only viable solution is to modernize Social Security. Modernization would not affect people who are currently in or near retirement. Instead, it would offer younger workers a chance to invest a portion of their payroll taxes in personal savings accounts (PSA). Modernization would be a victory for all Americans and offers many benefits, such as higher retirement payments and personal ownership of PSAs that can be passed on to heirs.
Sure, if you … and Big Tobacco … and all the rest of the wonderful folks inhabiting this IP address say so. And that’s just what I saw under 151.200.70.81 the other evening; although I’m not a confident Internet sleuth, DDC still appears to own the whole 151.200.70.* IP address range. That leaves a bunch of other 4 number codes to sift through, but there’s clearly a bit of a political pattern already.
So what
Now just because I don’t share the politics, implied or otherwise, of the constellation of organizations sharing the 151.200.70.* IP range, that doesn’t make what’s happening here some kind of illegal conspiracy. Online voter organizing is arguably fair game on both sides — maybe it’s no more than people self-selecting themselves into the political data cattleyards of their choice. If a number of seemingly unrelated cattleyards turn out to be on the same servers in Alexandria somewhere, what of it?
Well, perhaps that we’re looking at a kind of industrial scale metaspam here, cookie cutter organizations that create the illusion of huge support with relatively little real human activity at the heart of it. And the prospect of a paid, IT-weaponized army of shills skewing the public discourse on political issues of the day is at least a wee bit more disturbing yet.
It’s not unthinkable and it’s not implausible. As Teresa Nielsen Hayden once wrote:
But at least uncovering that can be a community process. So: is anyone else getting political comments tracing from the 151.200.70.* IP address group? Maybe it’s not happening — but I’ve got a way to make sure on my site, and that’s to ban future comments tracing to that address group and to the astroturfing P.R. company that owns it.
=====
* This has happened to me before with CENTCOM, the DoD Central Command operations site in Tampa, Florida.
**A couple of sites I saw appeared to be planned but nonexistent at the time I looked: curediabetesnow.info and protectpatientsfirst.org.
UPDATE, 8/23: Welcome, “Making Light” readers! I hope those of you with blogs will check your own visits for this IP address block.
UPDATE, 8/27: Ann Bartow (“Feminist Law Professors”) has collected a number of other examples of “chaff” — opinions paid for or instigated by astroturf operations, and in a comment here, “Pony” points out an account of a Monsanto-orchestrated smear campaign.
UPDATES, 8/31:
1) Teresa Nielsen Hayden (“Making Light”) rounds up astroturf comment orchestrator sightings, and identifies Netvocates and The Rendon Group (IP 12.40.165.147) as two leading practitioners; Netvocates claims to “never engage in anonymous commenting on blogs,”, but a reverse lookup of its IP address (66.113.130.183) seems unusually inconclusive. In other words, it might be hard to tell whether Netvocates is keeping its promise or not. (But I’m also inexperienced at this.)
2) In a second comment, “Pony” points out that PR Watch follows astroturf stories and has a special tag for them.
3) Bill Humphries, “More Like This WebLog” has a nice line: “Barlow didn’t realize that moneyed interests would treat open society as damage and route around it.”
Category: Post. Tags: election06, industrial deception.
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August 23rd, 2006 at 1:47 pm
your last ** footnote:
“curediabetesnow.info” sounds like it is going to be an anti-stem-cell astro-turf.
“protectpatientsfirst.org”? Probably more “tort reform”, i.e. remove accountability for MDs, hospitals, and insurance companies.
Thanks for this excellent reporting (got here via TNH).
August 23rd, 2006 at 4:28 pm
Thanks for the nice comment. I thought the same thing about the “Protect Patients First” group, but I don’t get the diabetes-anti-stem cell connection, could you elaborate?
August 23rd, 2006 at 8:52 pm
Thanks for exploring this in more depth. I had been frequenting a certain blog by a well-known progressive writer which seemed to be infected by such a ‘Netvocate,’ who insisted on responding to every comment on a post with a ‘personal’ rebuttal that really amounted to nothing more than rightwing talking points. The person listed an e-mail address at the domain “x.com” and that turned out to lead to the PayPal homepage.
I don’t have the tools or the knowledge to dig into IP addresses and really trace this person, but it just seemed too neat to be true. I suppose it could have been someone who really believes that claptrap, who is just trying to preserve anonymity on the Net, but given the context (visible progressive writer) it made the hairs on my neck stand up.
Unlike everyday trolls, this person would not quit, and is probably still there.
August 23rd, 2006 at 9:45 pm
Sounds a little like Al (or is it AI?) at “Political Animal”/Washington Monthly.
I don’t think you can generally look into the visits to a site you don’t own (unless you’re able and willing to hack into it, ie, convincingly pretend you’re an owner.) The thing to do might be to ask the “visible progressive writer” to look into it a bit (and maybe tell him/her about this post as an example). Big shots often seem to have more professional setups than mine, that might store information about visits longer, keep histories of visits and so forth. But even so, IP addresses often don’t tell you very much, so you and/or the writer shouldn’t necessarily expect a conclusive answer.
August 28th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
These creatures have been working usenet and yahoo member-only “disease” groups for sometime. In those cases, they are entirely funded by the marketing departments of pharmaceutical companies. It’s part of the “research and develpment” (R&D) budget that is tacked onto the price tag for your medication, particularly the one being hyped in all the media, but no real proof of lowering mortality or study of side effects. Yet. (That’s where you come in
).
The bigget offenders in disease astro-turfs are breast cancer, heart, diabetes, and arthritis. They are a spin-off from their pharma sponsored (and literally bought and paid for) non-profit disease advocacy organizations which sponsor all those neat funding raising ventures.
Even agochemical producers (who are just as likely to do pharmaceuticals too under another name) have been working this for a long time.
See George Monbiot 2002 Guardian article on Monsanto.
August 29th, 2006 at 1:40 am
The Monsanto file:
http://ngin.tripod.com/deceit_index.html
No matter which side of the GMO issue you’re on, this is an object lesson in how public opinion is being created.
August 29th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
You might want to take a look at this as well: http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=919
August 29th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
Ringling Brothers! It’s like a bad Batman episode.
Along those lines (and the Monsanto story “Pony” forwards), there’s the tobacco whistleblower story told in The Insider. This kind of stuff — hardball corporate PR and worse — is certainly happening; it’s just hard to know just how endemic it is, and it’s a little scary to think about. All else being equal, richer companies and people in charge who believe “big corporations are always right” make me guess it’s on the rise.
August 29th, 2006 at 8:09 pm
A useful site for astroturf updates:
http://www.prwatch.org/taxonomy/term/110/9
August 31st, 2006 at 6:44 pm
Thanks very much, Pony. I’ve added this to an 8/31 update here, and left a comment about it at the “Making Light”‘s astroturf roundup post mentioned in that update.
[return to "Their Voice. Amplified..."]
September 23rd, 2006 at 6:44 am
Check out my videoblog– I am investigating astroturfing on the internet, and you may find it interesting.
just occurred to me that i am astroturfing you in a way… quite ironic really!
January 24th, 2010 at 7:16 pm
This a satirical comment and not real:
——————————————
Given last week’s Supreme Court ruling on “Citizens United v. FEC” my client, DDC Advocacy ( AKA DEMOCRACY DATA & COMMUNICATIONS, LLC) has asked me to inform you that you are no longer legally allowed to violate the free speech rights of their corporate personage by blocking the 151.200.70.* address block. My client and I hereby demand that you remove both the block and this entire blog post and all related comments from your website. Again, you are violating the free speech rights accorded to the personage of DDC Advocacy by the Supreme Courts of this United States of America.
Sincerely,
THE ACLU
————————————————–
For all you free speech lovers, you can find a more current list of dns entries associated with DDC Advocacy (mouthpiece and megaphones for corporate personages across this great land) at the following location: http://who.is/nameserver/ddcns1.democracydata.com/
Some of the interesting entries: fanniemaepac.com, txeir.com (Texas Employers for Immigration Reform), dtesu.org,generationstogether.net, preserveraptorjobs.com (a dead site that appears to be a contractor wanting to renew some juicy military contracts, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXFXn0Ky0M0)
November 2nd, 2012 at 1:19 pm
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