Astroturfing doesn't pay

Apparently, pretending to be a customer can be expensive:

http://www.seattlepi.com/business/1310ap_us_online_product_reviews.html



Ruh-roh

Sounds like more Big Brother/L33t to me. They must haaaate the freedom the 'net gives the serfs.

So, maybe we need to get the FTC on the case of traffic bots, false search keywords, pay-to-join group inviters, and prim babies?

And low-prim furniture.

methinks they are more targeted to things like the teeth whitening scams that use multiple fake copies of a web page / blog with fake (often duplicate) testimonials, to encourage you to give up credit information for the "just pay shipping", then turn around and use international law to hide behind, while they siphon off your credit card, with no way for you to stop them..... it's targeted at false advertising, which apparently people still fall for.

But these laws that curtail freedom always get passed due to some 'legitimate' reason.

Yes. The 'legitmate' reason would be to slap the activities of cheats and thieves.
If we could just kill cheats and thieves, there wouldn't be a need to pas laws and regulations that curtailed bad behaviour.

Sounds like it's more targeted at the style where a company pays a blogger to mention (and praise) a certain product, making it look like the blogger is spontaneously singing the product's praise on his own, personal blog.
At least here, we have rules that paid ads must be distinguishable from editorial content. It makes sense to enforce that in digital media as well.

The particular case in the news is about a company that had their employees post positive reviews on company time for their services (cosmetic surgery if I remember). They were dumb enough to have emails documenting it: "Business is slow, post some reviews".

The closest analogy I can think of for SL would be people posting reviews and votes for an XstreetSL item from their alts.

That'd be small potatoes. Not worth going after. The closest analog would be a Linden posting as a resident about how well their business is doing, or arguing that some Linden policy was good, or making a blog about all the wonderful things SL has to offer, or harassing a critical blogger, or something like that.

That "legitimate" reason is the philosophy that has been worming its way into government, business and culture for the past 30 years. That philosophy is why banks who broke our economy are being bailed out, none of the rampant mortgage fraud has been prosecuted, nor has any of the realtor fraud.

That philosophy can be summed up as: if you trust us with your money, you are too stupid to have any so we'll be taking it all.

Basically this. A couple of companies selling mortgages here in the Netherlands were revealed to be posting at various consumer boards, pretending to be clients, and saying how good the product was and how great their customer service was. In these cases, the companies were gladly stupid enough to do it all from their office IP, but this kind of marketing is happening all over the net in increasing numbers. There are already companies doing this as a professional service for their clients.
So basically: be VERY wary of recommendations on the interweb. Even on insuspicious forums.

Wouldn't that besides being unethical, get one booted of XStreet?