Author warns of Russia's and China's 'Spinternet'

Unfortunately I agree with much of what this author says, to wit; "The border between cyber-utopianism and cyber-naivete is a blurring one," he writes in "The Net Delusion." "In fact, the reason why so many politicians and journalists believe in the power of the Internet is because they have not given this subject much thought. Their faith is not a result of the careful examination of how the Internet is being used by dictators or how it is changing the culture of resistance and dissent."

Makes me sad.

What I want to know is how can we tell? How can we tell if some topic is totally spun by a larger entity?

Just as an example, most folks who read Linux-related web sites firmly believe that Microsoft and/or Wagg-Ed have paid shills that disrupt Linux conversations. There's the obvious pro-Windows entities, like "Loverock Davidson" in the ZDNet forums, but at least some folks beleive that most or all of the radically pro-Linux ultra-fanboys are planted too, to discredit the more moderate and logical Linux fans.

There's not a single shred of evidence to support this, except maybe Microsoft's history of paying for pro-Microsoft studies, but still people believe.

How am I to tell that a government has set its propaganda agencies on a topic?

If you're in London, The London School of Economics and Political Science is having a public lecture next week with this author, Evgeny Morozov. I believe it'll be available as a podcast after the fact, for anyone who can't get there.

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2011/20110119t1830...

The good news from the propogandists point of view is that it seems you only need to pay people very small amounts of money (50 cents) to encourage them to engage in propaganda. With the budgets available to governments this should permit them to scale their human operations quite well.

In a totally unscientific sampling, I've seen plenty of stuff in the last few years in terms of news articles and YouTube videos which certainly look like explicit propaganda. The problem is that propaganda may often be subtle, with no easy method to clearly identify astroturfers from genuine opinions.

You can even find the propaganda bloggers on HN, at least it appears: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jojogogo

Luckily, the astroturfing is...not so good in most cases from what I've seen of the Chinese bloggers. There's a few times where I've noticed oddly pro-Chinese opinions that were well formed and articulated, but I think some of those are indeed genuine.

Individuals are still responsible for using the tools that are available to them, the evolution from broadcast media to open internet won't change that.