Reverse Spam? Poisoning the Well?
George Clooney
suggests a way
to neutralize celebrity stalker websites:
“There is a simple way to render these guys useless,” Clooney advised […]
“Flood their Web site with bogus sightings. Get your clients to get 10 friends to text in fake sightings of any number of stars. A couple hundred conflicting sightings and this Web site is worthless. No need to try to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless.
(Hat tip to kkos for the link.)
While I appreciate the sentiment, and wouldn’t want to be hounded by paparazzi, this reminds me a bit too much of spam.
I haven’t visited the site(s) in question, but it sounds like some sort of community project, where people post sightings of celebrities, and all the different sightings are assembled into a composite dossier on what $CELEBRITY has been doing.
There seem to be three categories of people involved: the community members, who thirst for each droplet of celebrity gossip and want to know the moment J-Lo shaves her armpits; they want the site to remain up and useful. There are the celebrities themselves, who presumably want the site shut down or neutralized. There may be some non-famous privacy advocates with free time on the side of the celebrities. And then there are people like me: I don’t give a rat’s ass about Brad or George or Angelina or whoever they’re schtupping this week; nor do I read People magazine, gossip columns, or sites like whichever one Clooney’s talking about, above. And while I’m sympathetic to his plight, and as much fun as I might take in poisoning the site’s database, I just can’t see myself taking the time to post.
So how does a small number of people (celebrities, their friends, and sycophants) post enough sightings to counter the thousands (tens of thousands? Millions?) of people ready and willing to post accurate sightings?
The obvious answer seems to be bots. And that’s just what email spammers, weblog comment spammers, and wiki spammers have been doing. So there’s already a whole array of defenses in place and ready to be deployed. This weblog, for intance, uses Spam Karma 2 to filter out comment spam, and it seems to be doing a teriffic job. There are lots of plugins for weblogs and wikis to filter out spam.
Then again, maybe I’m wrong, and it only takes a few score dedicated people to poison the relevant databases useless, in which case I wish George luck. But color me skeptical