ATS's Lawyers Ask Website to Take Down Article about Paid Disinformants

The Conscious Life News website (www.consciouslifenews.com) put up an article on January 8th, 2013, entitled "I Was a Paid Internet Shill: How Shadowy Groups Manipulate Internet Opinion and Debate."  This article is the same one featured in the 2nd YouTube video shown in the previous blog entry, below.

The article itself originally comes from an ATS post by someone who claims to have worked as a paid disinformant to spread disinformation on specific topics and on specific websites, though he claims that ATS itself was not one of these websites.

Four days after putting up this article, on January 14th, 2013, consciouslifenews.com (CLN) was contacted by lawyers representing ATS, asking them to remove the article from their website:

Update 1/12/2013: CLN has received a takedown notice asking us to remove this article on the basis that “It is libelous and utterly false” from someone claiming to be a legal agent of Above Top Secret’s parent company. We are currently investigating and will post status updates as they become available. The original thread now appears to have vanished from Above Top Secret’s website.

Note that the takedown request is not because ATS felt as though posting the article violated any intellectual property rights they had to it, took away from their traffic, or slighted their own website in any way, but because the article was "libelous and utterly false."  Since the person who wrote the article says very clearly at the beginning that ATS was not the site he was paid to work on, who does ATS think has suffered from libel?  Certainly not their own website, not that their website hasn't been criticized and attacked as government-run before anyway.  Isn't the excuse given by ATS's lawyers just an excuse to have an article which is inconvenient to them removed from the internet, since they don't want the idea to occur to too many of its members that ATS might actually be infested (and even administrated) by paid disinformants?


CLN posted further updates to their website in the following days:

Update 1/17/2013: We have requested clarification regarding the takedown request and have not received a response. We will provide updates on any new developments.

Update 4/3/2012: Above Top Secret’s legal agent never responded to our request for clarification of their takedown request. The original thread has now been moved to the “Hoax” category of the website, as ATS claims the author admitted it was a hoax in a private exchange. To the best of our knowledge, this private exchange or the details thereof have not been posted publicly to substantiate this claim. Regardless, we believe that covert operations to manipulate online opinion and debate do exist (and indeed have been publicly acknowledged in many of the supporting links below). Whether this specific case is true or not, it remains a valuable and provocative dialogue still worthy of consideration.

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CLN Editor’s Note: The type of propaganda strategy described in the article below occurs across a wide range of topics and is employed by various corporate, political, and governmental groups to promote a variety of agendas. It is called astroturfing, and it is far more common than most would imagine.

[...]

For more information on this important topic, see:

• Revealed: US Spy Operation That Manipulates Social Media
• Astroturfing: What Is It and Why Does It Matter?
• Corporate-Funded Online ‘Astroturfing’ Is More Advanced and More Automated Than You Might Think
• DON’T TRUST THE WEB
• Online Astroturfing Gets Sophisticated
• US Military Says Metal Gear Sock Puppets Are Real
• Millions Spent to Confuse Public About Geoengineering (Not specifically about online “astroturfing,” but alludes to the same core propaganda strategy)

- Alcyone @CLN

The original article at CLN can be found here: consciouslifenews.com/paid-internet-shill-shadowy-groups-manipulate-internet-opinion-debate/