What's shocking to me is the blatant manipulation of the mob. Maybe this has gone on forever, but seeing it happen in real time on sites like Reddit is tripping me out. While I think my BS filter is more sophisticated than most, on the morning it was released I sent the Shell party video to a colleague to ask if he was there not realizing it was a spoof. Turns out he happened to know there was no such party.
I feel like the internet is becoming an increasingly dangerous place, and subtly so.
If you are shocked by the "blatant manipulation of the mob", the advertising you see all around you every day, everywhere must put you in a permanent state of catatonia.
How come the combination of internet and activism is suddenly "dangerous", and not the pervasive and misleading propaganda we've been subjected to for generations?
Shell can no longer drown out the opposition with millions of dollars and now it's a problem?
Shell had responded to the challenge that the accepted definition of the phrase "sustainable development" was "development which meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".
Is that definition highly controversial now?
In any event, that certainly does not constitute a massive propaganda campaign against the public.
Depends on which "we" you're talking about. But in the US, these are rarely enforced, and then only against blatant lies that have substantial financial impact.
It's perfectly legal to mislead, confuse, shade, distort, bamboozle, trick, and distract. And you can lie outright if the lie is small. Or if it qualifies as puffery, which basically the kind of lie we have come to expect from people selling stuff.
For example, Shell can say "We care about the environment" and show pictures of frolicking wildlife. They aren't obligated to say, "but we care about profits more" and show some pictures of oil spills.
My favorite example is Airborne, a purported cold preventative that does precisely nothing. They lied in their advertisements for years and made fistfuls of money. After more than a decade somebody finally sued them, and eventually the FTC beat them down as well. The result is that they had to give some of their ill-gotten gains back, and now lie by implication rather than by direct false statements.
But that only happened because a) they were provably wrong, and b) they had enough money for class action lawyers to decide it was worth years of effort to take a whack at their money pinata. As long as your lie isn't provably costing money and provably false, you're basically golden.
Said laws are pretty flexible, I wouldn't rely on them giving you a significant boost of certainty in many products you buy. But apart from actual lies, I believe the intent of the phrase "drown out" is supposed to convey that they can just put so much noise out there it's not feasible for an average Joe who doesn't really care to be able to detect the signal. Noise doesn't have to be false.
I tried googling for some example campaigns, but I couldn't find any examples. I would assume it would almost be impossible to do so in the age of the Internet, reddit, facebook, and twitter. Do you have any examples of Shell drowning out environmentalist groups like Greenpeace?
I didn't mean to imply there actually has been such flooding by Shell, just that it's not about the truth of advertising. I'm a citizen of the internet with AdBlockPlus, but I remind myself that a huge number of people still watch television and read magazines and newspapers. Greenpeace had about $22m in total expenses in 2009 and 2010 each, Shell made $31bn in 2011 profits alone. Is there anything stopping Shell from dropping a few billion on advertising if they wanted to (and convinced the share holders it was a good idea)? They have the money to flood the most popular media outlets, but a top google result highlighting an "aggressive ad campaign" (http://adage.com/article/news/shell-oil-breaks-industry-sile...) suggests they only spend about $15m per year in advertising. When it comes down to it, they probably don't even need to bother. Consumers will get their gas from the lowest-priced gas station they know of. I actually think this action by Greenpeace works in Shell's favor purely due to association when people see the Shell logo as they're driving down a street for gas. I imagine for the common folk Greenpeace hopes to manipulate it produces more of an "oh you" reaction than "I hate you and will never buy from a Shell station!" one, if the image macros are even believed to be official. "Everyone knows" the oil companies are evil (or at least corrupted and in bed with the government).
For the record, this was also a top google result about a 2011 advertised claim being thrown out as misleading. http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2011/10/19/shell-ads-banned-ov... Not that it says much, I'm sure I can find instances of every multibillion dollar company lying (as well as Greenpeace and PETA).
It's an uneven playing field. In order to play on their pitch (i.e. show TV ads, billboards, magazine ads, etc.) you need to have a lot of money. If you don't have money, you can't get your message across. It's lobsided and unbalanced.
It's about as honest a debate as a soviet election where all other political parties are banned.
What Shell may have done -- namely, claiming jobs creation and downplaying environmental cost -- is something very different than what Greenpeace did here.
Photochopped some ads, hosted them, put up a website, made a fake twitter account. Made fun of a company's brand by pointing out the downplayed environmental cost.
I guess the interesting part to me is that, with the advent of news aggregators and social networks, the internet kind of removes the filter. A blatant lie can take off like wildfire and burn a lot of people before anyone can mobilize to put it out. Maybe I give journalists too much credit, but before the advent of the internet as we know it today, these organizations (whether big oil or Green Peace), had to filter the information through some sort of intermediary first. Now they have direct access to millions of people.
Yeah it's definitely a double-edged sword. Like the person whose house was posted to Craigslist with a "come and take what you want", which people did....and only too late did the owner find out -- and of course, he made no such offers. But the mob was quick to act and didn't ask many questions.
On the brighter side, there's quite a few exposés that we now witness that would have never seen the light of day otherwise (or would have been relegated to B-theaters, flea markets, and mail-order catalogs).
No. Those are pretty orthogonal notions (if you're talking about the idea that you excerpt existing pages that's not really what semantic web means nowadays), and the semantic web remains a terrible idea.
What we need is a more efficient legal process for online statements that cross the line into defamation, and better collaborative filtering (the whole point of sites like reddit is that the truth should out).
Please, no. Don't try to make us feel superior by disparaging the other aggregator. Even if there was a competition, blanket statements on a community would not impress.
I am sorry but a LOT of the big, influential NGOs are very guilty of that and of abusing polemic and demagogy. They seem to think their generally just causes/ideals justify almost all means. Sometimes they are more clever to play their cards right like in this case, sometimes they do a really terrible job and it backfires like when they attacked Apple over the completely made-up energy consumption of a shared hosting facility. But either way they are and always have been consciously using rhetoric means to manipulate people or to at least be heard. This is nothing new - haven't you ever been stopped by them in the streets when they are trying to sign you up for monthly donations? The tactics they are using there are nothing short of slimy car salesmen and ripe with psychological mind-frakks. This is nothing the internet allowed to happen, it has always been there. But the "good old days" when mostly techs were using the web and when the general signal-to-noise-ratio was better are over.
I feel like the internet is becoming an increasingly dangerous place, and subtly so.