BOMBSHELL: Microsoft Tries Wiki Astroturfing
Astroturfing isn’t just the stuff of grass replacement anymore; it’s also the term for any PR campaign that tries to appear as an honest, grassroots, spontaneous product of the people. People don’t like to be deceived and when cases of Astroturfing have been discovered the result has usually been a backlash of negative publicity. Wikipedia, because of its prominence as an online authority and its ability to be edited by anyone, makes it a prime target for such manipulation.
It has now come to light that Microsoft attempted to pay individuals to change Wikipedia articles for its behalf. From the Seattle PI piece by Brian Bergstein:
Microsoft Corp. landed in the Wikipedia doghouse Tuesday after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced Web encyclopedia site.
While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries. So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.
“We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach,” Wales said.
This comes after Microsoft enraged the temperamental blogsphere a month ago by attempting to buy mentions of its Vista software from a select cadre of tech trendsetters. Before that Microsoft conducted astroturfing campaigns under the guises of the ‘Americans for Technology Leadership’ and the ‘Freedom to Innovate Network’.
Microsoft has stated that its only trying to correct errors. But considering its history of attempted bribery and past relation missteps its no wonder that even honest efforts end up in a bad light.
January 24th, 2007 at 9:01 am
If Microsoft was really just trying to correct errors they’d have employees do it. The only reason to pay outsiders to do it is because they know they may get caught and their IPs banned from Wikipedia (blocking them from making edits). So they had to know what they were doing was wrong. Not a surprise from a company with such a terrible history of business conduct.
January 24th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
[...] While we’re on the topic of Microsoft its worth mentioning that Bill Gates will be appearing on Monday’s Daily Show with John Stewart. While Stewart can make a politian squirm when pressed I’m betting that most questions for the outgoing leader will be softballs. [...]