As I mentioned the last time I wrote about Bitcoin, I’m not an economist: I’m a technology journalist who is intrigued on a technical level by the theory and mechanics behind a distributed, algorithmically-generated “currency”, and that makes me want to track it and occasionally cover it when the tech angle is strong. Now, I don’t actually own any Bitcoins, but what if I did?

If I were to own stock in a tech company (I don’t, by the way) and I found myself writing about said company, I would at the very least be obliged to put a disclosure into the article — in fact, I would probably just avoid writing about the firm altogether. However, bloggers and journalists don’t follow that convention with currencies. Imagine an American journalist covering the fortunes of the dollar, and putting in a disclaimer to say that all her savings are held in USD – it would seem daft.

So I posed the question on Twitter earlier: “What are the ethics of writing about Bitcoin if you’ve bought some (I haven’t). Does it require stock-style disclosure?” Some quickly responded in the affirmative:

@superglaze I disclose my Bitcoin holdings when I write about them.

— Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) March 22, 2013

@kristajessica @superglaze Same principle applies to media owners owning property and their papers constantly talking up house prices

— Natasha (@riptari) March 22, 2013

Whereas others were more circumspect:

@andyvan @superglaze I haven’t thought about it in as much detail, but I don’t think it’s the same as having stock.

— Nate Lanxon (@NateLanxon) March 22, 2013

There’s some serious debate going on about whether or not Bitcoin actually is a currency, but I (like the U.S. Treasury Department, it seems) feel that it is, albeit an unique one. Its uniqueness stems not only from the way in which its creation is automated, but also from its current volatility and, crucially, the fact that people don’t generally understand it very well. We all know what nationally-issued currencies like dollars and yen are, and we don’t need the concept explained to us every time we read an article about them. The situation with Bitcoin is very different.

I strongly suspect Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in recent weeks is largely an echo chamber effect — coverage begets coverage — which puts those writing about it in an unusual position. We bloggers and journalists have an extraordinary amount of influence in people’s perceptions of Bitcoin and, as a result, the trajectory of its value. For that reason alone, I think any coverage from a writer who has bought into Bitcoin should come with a clear disclosure.

That said, my colleague Tom Krazit also brought up an interesting tangential point in discussion, suggesting that writers covering Bitcoin may actually have an obligation to buy into it on a low level, so they can conduct a few transactions and basically have a clearer idea of what they’re talking about in their coverage.

This is all clearly a new and unusual field to explore, so I’d be interested in hearing further thoughts on the subject.

The plan in which 10 columnists received $2,000 to $36,000 each to write about Malaysia was carried out by Joshua Trevino, an opinion writer and the operation’s bagman. Trevino himself, who was a columnist for the Guardian until the paper dropped him in 2012 over conflict-of-interest issues, received $389,724 from the government of Malaysia.

The Malaysian government’s goal was to discredit Anwar Ibrahim, an opposition leader and the target of a politically charged sodomy trial that was decried by human rights groups.

The upshot is that prominent American media outlets printed propaganda from a semi-totalitarian foreign government. While the scheme is disturbing, it is not entirely new; nasty regimes have long used Washington PR firms to spread disinformation.

What is new, however, is how much easier it’s become to place such propaganda thanks to online journalism’s insatiable appetite for content. Today, publications of every stripe are eagerly sucking up outside contributions to fill their websites. The contributions are tarted up with a variety of names — such as “expert opinions” or “guest voices” — but they amount to the same thing: additional content that is often free.

But in their rush to pump up their content, sites may be dropping their screening standards. Unlike like the New York Times, which has long had strict systems to prevent conflicts of interest, many online publications may not have the time or the energy to rigorously watch for bad apples.

In response to an email query, the Huffington Post offered the following statement: ”This is a clear violation of HuffPost’s blogging policy that requires disclosure of payments and conflicts of interest. As soon as we learned of this conflict, we removed the posts from our site. In addition to a very clear policy, we have a team of blog editors who are trained to spot potential conflicts as they review each blog that gets submitted. Posts are routinely declined.”

Jack Fowler, the publisher of National Review, declined to provide an immediate comment; he has since provided a response in the comments below.

While after-the-fact measures may mitigate the damage, it doesn’t change the fact that, in this wild-west clamor for content, it’s become easier for the likes of Malaysia’s leaders to ooze their voice into American media. (Likewise, some companies have succumbed to the temptation of hiring sock-puppet journalists to shill for their side.)

Overall, it’s perhaps inevitable that more content has brought more corruption to the media. The good news, however, is that the growth of online media outlets also affords the opportunity for more whistle blowers; my colleague, Mathew Ingram, in the case of social media sites like Twitter, likens the process to a self-cleaning oven.

The Malaysia episode also reflects an other example of how BuzzFeed, best known for cat photos and titillating viral fare, is rapidly climbing the serious media firmament.

(Disclosure: the Guardian News & Media is an investor in paidContent’s owner, Giga Omni Media).

(Image by Straight 8 Photography via Shutterstock)

Lord Justice Leveson, who has been hearing issues including the “hacking” of mobile phones for news stories, said the existing Press Complaints Commission (PCC), comprised of newspaper editors, is “not actually a regulator at all”. And he has rejected news publishers’ alternative suggestion of binding themselves to ethical standards by commercial contracts.

Instead, he is advising the government to legislate the creation of a new independent body to promote “high standards” and safeguard individuals’ rights, run by a chair and a board who will hold publishers to a code.

Leveson is leaving the definition of that code and the implementation of the new body to whomever Prime Minister David Cameron, should he follow the recommendation, might appoint to set them up. But Leveson suggests the code should outline what constitutes “public interest” – a thorny topic on which newspapers and others often disagree.

The Lord Justice says publishers will be incentivised to adhere to this code because it will create an alternative dispute arbitration forum that will be cheaper than court battles — if publishers lost against a complainant in court, they would face heftier damages awards than in arbitration.

Whether this is enough of an incentive if unclear — after all, news publishers have operated in what Leveson called a “reckless” manner with the threat of hefty court fines up until this point.

Newspaper industry campaigners had worried that Leveson’s report, if it required legislation, would amount to state interference in newsgathering. They had highlighted United States citizens’ right to free speech under their First Amendment. But Leveson says:

“This is not, and cannot be characterised as, statutory regulation of the press. The legislation would not establish a body to regulate the press: it would be up to the press to come forward with their own body that meets the criteria laid down.

“The legislation would not give any rights to Parliament, to the Government, or to any regulatory (or other) body to prevent newspapers from publishing any material whatsoever.

“Nor would it give any rights to these entities to require newspapers to publish any material except insofar as it would require the recognised self-regulatory body to have the power to direct the placement and prominence of corrections and apologies in respect of information found, by that body, to require them.”

That definition of the body’s role sounds somewhat akin to that of the existing Press Complaints Commission, which is now discredited. But Leveson also says: “(The legislation) would enshrine, for the first time, a legal duty on the Government to protect the freedom of the press.”

But the new body must be recognised by Ofcom, the existing and powerful regulator of UK radio spectrum, telecommunications infrastructure and broadcasting standards — and Leveson suggests Ofcom be used as a “backstop” regulator for publishers that refuse to join the new scheme.

Leveson said: “For the seventh time in less than 70 years, there is a new report commissioned by the government dealing with concerns about the press. The PCC has failed in the task — if, indeed, it ever saw itself as having such a task — of keeping the press to its responsibilities to the public. There must be change.”

In sum, the Leveson Inquiry report amounts to a stern telling off for British newspapers, sets the basic colour and ideas for a slightly enhanced regulatory body but leaves all of the next steps to government — a process that is likely to be mired in ongoing political wrangling.

Update: Prime Minister David Cameron says he agrees with much of the recommendations but not the need to create the new body through state legislation:

“For the first time, we would have crossed the rubicon of writing elements of press regulation into the law of the land.

“We should, I believe, be wary of any legislation that has the potential to infringe free speech and a free press.

“In this House – which has been a bulwark of democracy for centuries – we should think very, very carefully before crossing this line.”

Debate has been brewing in the UK since July, when crime and thriller authors from around the world gathered at the popular annual Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. A panel on ebooks featured two British thriller authors, Steve Mosby and Stephen Leather. During the panel, Leather revealed that he uses “sock puppet” accounts. Fellow panelist Mosby transcribed the exchange on his blog (and the recording is available here):

SL: I’ll go onto several forums, from the well-known forums, and post there, under my own name and under various other names and various other characters. You build this whole network of characters who talk about your books and sometimes have conversations with yourself. And then I’ve got enough fans.

[Mosby]: So you use sock puppet accounts, basically?

SL: I think everyone does. Everyone does. Or I have friends who are sock puppets, who might be real, but they might pick a fight with me.

[Mosby]: Are your readers aware of this, or…?

SL:  Well, I think that everyone … well, are the readers aware of it? No … But they’re not buying it because of the sock puppet. What you’re trying to do is create a buzz. And it’s very hard, one person, surrounded by a hundred thousand other writers, to create a buzz. I mean, that’s one of the things that publishers do. They create a buzz. One person on their own, difficult to create a buzz. If you’ve got 10 friends, and they’ve got friends, and you can get them all as one creating a buzz, then hopefully you’ll be all right.

Jeremy Duns, a British author of spy novels and a journalist who now lives in Sweden, began investigating Leather and turned up two of his “sock puppet” accounts, one of which belonged to a real self-published author named Steve Roach. “Roach had been very annoyed at what Leather was doing in the Amazon forums,” Duns told me. “He called him out quite aggressively. Leather reacted very furiously and waged a campaign against Roach for about a year online.”

Roach told Duns that Leather posted one-star reviews of his books to Goodreads and wrote a short story featuring “a sleazy villain” after Roach. Leather also created a Twitter account, @WriterRoach, in Steve Roach’s name. He used it to promote his own books and to make digs at Roach.

‘You’ve outsmarted me’

“Steve Roach sent an email to Stephen Leather saying, can you please stop? You’ve outsmarted me,” Duns says. “Leather was very gracious in his acceptance that he had beaten this guy. He said, I actually have two Twitter accounts in your name. I’m going to delete one of them and give the other one to you.”

Duns taped his phone conversation with Roach, but Roach now says he was tricked and wasn’t told he was being taped.

When I got in touch with Leather, he called Duns a “troll” and sent me a PDF of a letter written by Roach which begins, “With regard to the confrontations that I had with Stephen Leather while we were promoting our books on the Amazon forums, I do not look back on it as cyberbullying, more a straightforward confrontation in which I eventually conceded defeat (because Leather was better at it than I was).”

Leather also confirmed to me that he had created fake accounts to review his own books. “Yes, I said that. It was recorded so I can’t really deny it,” he wrote to me in an email. “But I never really got a chance to explain what I meant and there was an element of mis-speaking, but yes I said it. I didn’t do it much, and only over a couple of months. The reason was that writers were coming in for a lot of flak when they posted under their own names and I was being trolled unmercifully. So it was easier to talk to other posters using a pen name, which is something that the majority of forum users do.

‘I should have just kept my mouth shut’

“I didn’t attack people, generally it was just a way of talking to readers.  I haven’t done it for well over a year.  I also tweeted under different names, and again most people on Twitter use pen names. I don’t do that any more, either. Basically at Harrogate I was asked how a new writer could get themselves known and I was trying to explain how to get a word-of-mouth buzz going. . . . Obviously with hindsight I should have just kept my mouth shut.”

Leather’s print publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, had no comment.

More recently, the New York Times reported that thriller author John Locke — the first self-published author to sell over a million books on Kindle — paid several thousand dollars for 300 reviews through a now-defunct site called GettingBookReviews.com. Locke had attributed his success to low prices (all his books are $0.99) and fan outreach.  ”Reviews are the smallest part of being successful,” Locke told the NYT’s David Streitfeld. “But it’s a lot easier to buy them than cultivating an audience.”

Over the weekend, Jeremy Duns exposed British thriller author RJ Ellory for promoting his own books under fake accounts and slamming books by rivals (Ellory has since apologized), while crime writer Stuart Neville has begun “naming sock puppet names” on his blog.

The retailer response

In response to my query on how it has handled “sock puppet” reviews, Amazon sent me a link to its review guidelines with no other comment.

Barnes & Noble did not respond to my request for comment.

Kobo did not directly answer my question about reader reviews. “We’re in the process of formalizing our online/social media guidelines,” Rene d’Entremont, the company’s media relations manager, told me. But those guidelines apply to Kobo employees, not to users. “For online book reviews, we collaborate with Goodreads.com, a company that shares the same core values of transparency and using social to encourage conversations among readers,” d’Entremont said.

Social reading site Goodreads also has review guidelines that prohibit “commercial reviews.” Members can also flag suspect reviews. “Our approach to reviews is very different from other sites,” CEO Otis Chandler told me. When users click on a book, the first reviews they see are by their friends, then from people they’ve chosen to follow, and finally from the broader community. The Goodreads algorithm prioritizes community reviews by number of ‘likes,’ the popularity of the reviewer and how recent the review is. “One of the most consistent pieces of feedback I hear from members is that they find reviews on Goodreads more real and trustworthy — ‘you can tell they are by real readers’ — than reviews on other sites,” Chandler says.

A code of ethics for writers

So far, 56 authors — including Laura Lippman, Michael Connelly and Lee Child — have signed this statement vowing they’ll never create “sock puppet” reviews. ”But the only lasting solution is for readers to take possession of the process,” they write. “The Internet belongs to us all. Your honest and heartfelt reviews, good or bad, enthusiastic or disapproving,­ can drown out the phoney voices, and the underhanded tactics will be marginalized to the point of irrelevance.”

The UK-based Crime Writers’ Association posted a statement on “sock puppets” on its website and says it’s “keen to find a course that helps preserve the integrity of crime writing, and the traditional supportiveness of the genre.”

So far, the “sock puppets” controversy has centered around crime and thriller authors, and the issue has received the most attention in that community. But these practices aren’t limited to one genre of books, and fake reviews remain a widespread problem not just for books but for other products online, with University of Illinois professor Bing Liu estimating that a third of online reviews are fake.

It’s 2023, and here you are, 13 years old and finally ready for your own Facebook page (assuming that Facebook still exists and hasn’t changed its policies)! I’m sorry if my decision not to digitally document your life up to this point somehow makes it tougher for you to be successful.

With the exception of a few Instagram shots now and then and some private YouTube videos so close friends and family could watch you grow (your mother has been a little more free with photos of you on Facebook), I have been pretty adamant about keeping your life in the physical realm. I figured you’d thank me for it because you would be able to create your own digital identity and decide yourself how much you wanted to share with the world.

You see, as I write this, it’s 2012, and social media is still a relatively new idea. Most people have no clue how sharing all this personal information on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other sites will affect the way we think about privacy and reputation. But I think it’s a safe bet that by the time you read this, society will have figured out how to balance their desire to share information online with their desire to keep some semblance of a private life.

So I’ve been playing it safe. But some people can be really funny when it comes to Facebook. Hundreds of millions of people use the site and rave about it, and yet some of those same people (including, as I write this, the people who run Facebook) don’t think it is safe for kids under 13. And some even think we should have laws that tell you how you can and can’t use Facebook and other social media because sharing too many details about yourself can make you really unhappy later. (I personally don’t think that’s a good idea, but I’ll save that lesson that for another day.)

But wait, the whole thing gets even more complicated. Some of the people who think Facebook is so dangerous that we need new laws are also sharing every waking minute of their kids’ lives on the site. They are creating creating digital trust funds for their kids. They’re posting photos of young Isabella or tweeting about young Jacob or blogging about Ethan forgetting his lines at the school play — without, of course, ever asking their kids whether they want to share all those personal details with rest of the planet.

In 2012, some people estimated that more than 80 percent of children under 2 years old already had a digital profile because of their parents’ online activity!

I have no idea who is right or wrong in any of this. I could be way off base with my belief that parents shouldn’t share too much information about their kids online. But I just assume that when you’re reading this in 2023, you might not want all these details about you scattered around the web.

So I figure why risk scarring your reputation before you even get out of preschool. No need to have your first day at school forever linked to some picture of me dressed up like Amy Winehouse for Halloween 2009. I’ll let you decide what you want to share. We have all your photos, you can use them if you like.

Oh, and one other thing: Not too long ago, I lobbied to let people who unwillingly have had details about them exposed on sites like Facebook to sue their exposers in court. So it wouldn’t be right for to make that argument and at the same time force you into this brave, new and very public (despite what the privacy settings say) world before you’re even old enough to write a single word (much less compose a pithy tweet).

I hope I made the right decision, and I hope I can stick to my convictions as new technologies pop up over the next 10 years that make it even easier to share personal information about your life.

Love,

Dad

P.S.

If Facebook no longer exists or has fundamentally changed by the time you read this, please Google it to learn about its meteoric rise between 2008 and 2012. If Google no longer exists, well, ask me about it someday. There’s sure to be a quite a story there.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user woodleywonderworks.

The phenomenon has been on display again during this week’s epic intellectual property trial between Google vs Oracle. Florian Mueller, a self-proclaimed patent expert funded by both Oracle and Microsoft, has been issuing a flurry of biased blog posts that don’t mention his paymasters. (His risible excuse for the shameless plumping is that he’s an “analyst”).

Microsoft is hardly the first company to astroturf but it does deserve special mention for being a master of the craft. As well as its patent puppet, the company has a roster of other hired mouths. These include law professor James Grimmelmann who it paid to collect criticism of the Google book settlement and ICOMP a group devoted to smearing its rivals in the European Parliament. A number of mom-and-pop businesses suing Google for antitrust, it turns out, are also tied to Microsoft.

[Update: Grimmelmann notes that Microsoft had no approval or veto power over how the funds were used and adds the project also received support from the American Library Association. The project continues as a public resource website.]

This type of professional distortion may strike some as unethical. There is also the question of whether it should be illegal.

The Astroturf Police

In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission announced new rules about bloggers and endorsements. The rules seemed mostly for show until a year later when the FTC fined a public relations firm $250,000 for seeding Apple’s iTunes store with fake reviews.

The rules make it illegal to endorse companies without disclosing that you are being paid to do so. It’s less clear, though, if they also apply to writers who receive money to tear down competitors.

According to an FTC spokesperson, the rules require a paid endorser to disclose “all material facts.”

“An endorser’s affiliation would be considered material to readers as they evaluate what the endorser says about the competitors of the company that compensates the endorser,” she added.

This suggests that the FTC may have the power to rein in negative astro-turfing. But is this a good idea? Civil libertarians have long argued that the best solution to bad speech is not penalties but instead more speech.

Sleazy or Smart Business?

While the legal or ethical case for astro-turfing may be shaky, the business case is stronger.

For a company like Microsoft that is in tight competition for billions of dollars, spending a few million on astroturf may be a smart strategy. The potential pay-off is huge — especially if astroturf efforts get a rival dragged before court or regulatory investigations.

Some would add that astroturf is simply a part of playing in the corporate big-leagues. Political parties do it so why shouldn’t companies? In this light, companies that don’t astoturf are simply the tech equivalent of Washington goo-goos.

Likewise, nearly every big company donates money to non-profit groups, many of which have aggressive agendas. Astro-turfing could be considered just a further extension of this practice.

The problem here is that astro-turfing may help companies but it also harms the public’s ability to understand complicated issues in technology. Many people distrust the tech sector to begin with — soaking the news with misinformation can only deepen their suspicion.

For now, the only hope to tear up the astroturf is for companies to stop paying for it or for those who do it to get a conscience. It  may be a long wait either way.

News Corp has appointed Lord Grabiner QC as the independent chairman of the MSC. Grabiner is a commercial lawyer, who is also non-executive chairman of the retail holding company Arcadia Group, and has been a past head of the London School of Economics.

The MSC will work with authorities that are currently investigating News International in relation to the phone hacking scandal and the police corruption that has emerged as a by-product of that investigation. By appointing an outsider — not just to News Corp but to the media world as a whole — it is hoped that this will give the arm’s-length independence that the MSC will need to be credible.

According to the release, Grabiner and the MSC will report to Joel Klein, EVP and board director. Klein reports to Viet Dinh, an independent director and chairman of News Corp’s nominating and corporate governance committee.

The move comes at a time when there are increasing reports of the mess going down in the UK threatening to spill over into markets like the U.S. Last week, the first murmurs of questions started to emerge from investors, who will surely get louder if News Corp isn’t seen to be trying to improve practices with regards to ethics. Pointedly, the MSC looks like it is very much a UK committee, which is how News Corp would like to isolate the problem.

News corp notes that the board has given the MSC its “full support.”