A Newsvine user busted a powerful stealth campaign with just a few clicks, and a simple question. "Why does Newsvine allow political organizations to seed 'astroturf' content?"

He'd discovered a pattern to the way a story's URL had been suggested to the bloggers at Newsvine. The same user had suggested over 470 URLs, each one pointing only to articles on the exact same site.

And more investigation revealed the site could be tied to a powerful PR firm. "It turns out that it is a member of The New Media Alliance…a foundation established by Heritage New Media Partners, Inc., a public relations company," the user argued.

It turns out the URLs were all coming from Frank Salvato, the managing editor of the very web publication being promoted. According to his biography, Salvato is also a commentator who's appeared on radio and TV, including Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor.

Salvato disputes any publicity arrangement with the PR firm. "The fact is that I, alone, made an honest mistake in not thoroughly reading the 'Code of Conduct' at Newsvine before using the venue," Salvato told us. "[O]n a regular basis we rarely received more than a twenty-seven count in traffic from the Newsvine venue…testimony to the notion that we certainly weren't doing it for the traffic."

After making his discovery, the Newsvine user blew the whistle, writing an article for Newsvine. His exposé quickly reached the front page of Newsvine.com and became one of the site's most-active stories, receiving over 75 votes. ("Excellent catch," wrote one user. "We definitely cannot allow Newsvine to be used as an advertising base for websites, regardless of their positions…")

Within 90 minutes, his article received a response from Calvin Tang, the site's co-founder and chief operating officer. "Thank you for notifying us of this blatant disregard for the Code of Honor, rule #3," he wrote in the article's comments, reporting that the user has been off the main site and "back into the Greenhouse, pending his acceptance of our request to him that he abide by Newsvine's rules."

Ironically, the user discovering the shenanigans had the user name "Partisan Hack." But he's deadly serious about the site's user community. "If we are to have real citizens' journalism, we need to have some confidence that content being seeded and written in Newsvine has some level of independence and it not being put here at the behest of organizations or causes who want to use Newsvine as 'astroturf' — content that is meant to appear to be coming from the grass roots that is in fact sponsored for political or commercial goals."

Answering coments, Partisan Hack acknowledged a role for groups challenging the conventional wisdom "If they can challenge it openly - not through proxy agents masquerading as individuals," and "in ways that does not leverage their economic power to the disadvantage of a community's citizens."

It's not the first time this has happened. Earlier this month another user discovered a Monsanto publicist on the site promoting a blog lobbying for genetically modified food. ""These groups are free to promote any view they choose but what does it say about their ethics that plants are mixed among users to promote a business agenda? What does it say about the Monsanto strategy that free sites like ours and Yahoo! Answers have professional spin masters supplying corporate PR as opposed to paying to advertise?"

But there's another obvious take-away message. Any community site has an ad hoc legion of watchdogs on patrol — the site's own network of dedicated users. Newsvine reports over 1,000,000 users a month, and was recently acquired by MSNBC. ("[I]t's telling that this is the first acquisition of MSNBC.com's 11-year history," the Motley Fool reported.)

Any stealth publicity effort will face resistance from a site's passionate user base, at least judging by the fate of Salvato's original article. It's been replaced by a single 9-word sentence.

"This article has been removed by the Newsvine community."

Entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 7:09 pm under Internet.  Print This Post