Virtual Money For Real Lobbying 85
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by
ScuttleMonkey
from the sheeple-happy-to-be-paid-shills dept.
from the sheeple-happy-to-be-paid-shills dept.
ogaraf writes "Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that health-insurance industry group 'Get Health Reform Right' paid Facebook users with virtual currency to be used in Facebook games in exchange for lobbying their Congressional Rep. 'Instead of asking the gamers to try a product the way Netflix would, "Get Health Reform Right" requires gamers to take a survey, which, upon completion, automatically sends the following email to their Congressional Rep: "I am concerned a new government plan could cause me to lose the employer coverage I have today. More government bureaucracy will only create more problems, not solve the ones we have."'" Relatedly, Trailrunner7 illustrates growing concern over realistic spammer profiles in social networking sites and their potential to wreak havoc, especially if these two methods were combined. "Many spammers now have large staffs of people working on nothing but building out completely fake personas for non-existent users on social networking sites and blog networks. The spammers use these personas to create accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot and other sites that have high levels of user interaction."
Facebook currency (Score:5, Insightful)
Goldfarming (Score:1, Insightful)
How effective is this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Facebook currency (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't that depend on how much the other side of the issue is offering?
Ultimately a politician is a broker of priorities - the goal of the most earnest idealist is to do the most good for the most people while doing as little harm to as few people as possible. The ideal politician sits in the middle of this storm of costs and benefits of different actions just the way a stock broker sits in the middle of an exchange of money. Since it's hard to measure the true value of every priority to every constituent, lobbying effort becomes a proxy measure ... whoever is willing to throw the most money at an issue needs it the most. Obviously this model breaks down when not everyone has the same amount of money to commit to lobbying, but when the participants are roughly equal in resources and there isn't a clear right or wrong answer, just creating big donation bins labeled "yes" and "no" isn't an entirely bad idea.
Re:How effective is this? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would expect that congresscritters would be smart enough to discount any position expressed in the same exact email received 100,000 times. But perhaps I overestimate them; after all, I'd expect them not to try to pick up men in airport restrooms as well.
How is that different from a petition? If a congressperson was given a petition with over 100000 signatures on it I would expect him or her to take action. Is an email petition any different?
Health reform for the stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
For anyone in the US who thinks that the current system is any good whatsoever have a read of how losing your job can cost you your life [tampabay.com].
This paying in Facebook games just sums up the level of "debate". On one side you have a bunch of people who, like the old tobacco company, will swear blind that the current system is perfectly okay despite it killing an estimated 45,000 people a year. That is 15 9/11s in terms of un-needed deaths as a result of the current system which is being actively supported by those who profit from it.
The irony of course is that the US not only has the worst coverage it also has the most expensive healthcare in the world while also having a lower life expectancy than most other 1st world countries.
So to everyone who decrys the systems in Switzerland, France, Canada, UK, etc remember this. They save more lives, they result in a longer average life expectancy and they don't kill their citizens because they've lost their job. and they cost less, often half or less of the US spend per capita
More deaths for more money. And this is the system people want? No its the system that corporations with marketing departments want and the sheep are fine to go along if they get thrown some facebook points.
How sad
Re:"spammers"??? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Many spammers now have large staffs of people working on nothing but building out completely fake personas for non-existent users on social networking sites and blog networks. The spammers use these personas to create accounts Doesn't that make them astroturfers, not spammers?
Either way, that's a decently high level of dedication and sophistication. In any other context, this behavior would be called infiltration.
The best way to deal with spam is to do something about the people who enable them. Spammers are enabled by purchasing anything from them and by getting tricked by them (i.e. phishing). There are several ways to reduce both. I for one favor some kind of penalty or stigma for the former and education for the latter. The latter could be identified when they report the theft. Catching the former wouldn't be so difficult either. Just as police conduct sting operations, fake spam offers could be created for the purpose of identifying users who respond favorably to them.
At some point, a computer system becomes so secure that it's much easier to compromise its users, via social engineering. Likewise, at some point spammers become so sophisticated and so good at obfuscating their identities that it's much easier to reduce their revenues. The techniques and methods that spammers use has changed greatly over the years. The ways that they fund themselves and stay in business have changed very little by comparison.
Re:Facebook currency (Score:3, Insightful)