I love technology. It’s what allows us to have the awesome existence we live – from the wheel to a quad-core Xeon, all this technology is what enables human civilisation.
All properly designed technology is morally neutral. Like a hammer, it just is – neither inherently good or bad, since moral judgements like that derive from how it’s used.
What’s true of the hammer is true of pretty much everything else (at least, everything else that’s not designed with a specific, usually negative, goal in mind – it’s hard to argue that a nuclear bomb is morally neutral). The most versatile tools are the ones which lend themselves to the widest range of uses – both ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Computers are arguably the more versatile tools that humanity has ever made, and as such their capacity for abuse is nearly unlimited.
In some cases we can apply technological solutions to social problems caused by the abuse of technology. We use spam-filtering to stop the junk emails, we use denyhosts to stop the attacks on SSH, anti-virus and intrusion-detection systems to keep our system secure. These largely work because the abuse we’re trying to counter is mostly automated. In some respects, the never-ending escalation between white and black hats in this manner is good for the technological base as a whole – it has pushed new advances in text parsing, for example.
In other cases, technological solutions are either impractical or impossible. I’m going to talk about a specific example, and explain why I think this is a far more subtle and dangerous abuse of technology.
I use the microblogging service ‘Twitter’ – you can see my most recent update in the sidebar. I use it as a method of keeping up with a few people, and venting a bit. With only a few exceptions the people I ‘follow’ are people I either already knew or have met through Twitter ‘organically’ – by being linked to them by existing people I knew. To me, this seems like a normal approach to a service like this.
Twitter has issues with spammers mass-following people to get them to view their profiles and click links. This tends to be automated and can be tracked and dealt with much like any other spam. There’s another kind of mass-follower I’ve noticed in recent weeks which I think typifies the kind of subtle abuse of technology I want to talk about.
On a near daily basis I’m followed by people who specialise in ‘online marketing’. As far as I’ve been able to tell, this amounts to creating ‘virals’ (artificially spawned memes) and using social networking sites to engage in astroturfing. This is a more subtle abuse of the technology, but I think that it’s still an abuse. They’re playing social networks like a game in order to maximise their client’s return on their advertising budget. They’re not normal participants in the network – instead they attempt (with varying degrees of competence) to insinuate themselves in as if they were normal participants in order to promote whatever product their client is trying to sell. In the specific case of Twitter, this seems to usually be the ‘online marketeer’ trying to sell themselves and their services.
This is an abuse of the social network because it breaks down trust between users. Do I twitter about Fallout 3 because it’s an awesome game, or because I’m a paid shill of Bethesda? Can you trust the opinion of anyone online if you don’t personally know them? In traditional media it’s easy to accept that anyone you see on TV is probably an actor or that the clips they show were selected to show the product in a good light, but this kind of astroturfing is more akin to having someone in your local pub talking about their favourite things. We don’t expect commercial interests to taint opinions in social situations. Of course, this is precisely why marketing companies want to target social situations.
There’s no obvious way to automate elimination of this kind of abuse – if it’s done well then there’s no way to tell astroturfing apart from real opinions and grass-roots activism. If people reading it can’t tell the difference then there’s no way machine intelligence is going to be able to do it.
This kind of online astroturfing isn’t new – the first case I found out about that really pissed me off was the pretty distasteful stuff done to promote cleaning liquid. I’d already made the decision not to buy that product due to the horrendous TV advertising, but reading that case absolutely cemented the decision. I can only hope that the risk of that reaction if the marketing people are caught is enough to limit the growth of this kind of technology abuse, but I fear that by overloading their clients with buzzwords and claiming this is the only way to reach certain demographics unscrupulous marketing companies will continue to be able to pollute the social networks.
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