Back in april of 2005, my assertion that SEO could be used to censor "unwanted feedback" was greeted with a great deal of skepticism. Jimmy Wales even told me to put on a tin foil hat, so I could hide from the black helicopters (turns out that black helicopters exist too, but they are usually related to US special forces training... no luck on the foil hats, however...). Jeff Jarvis told me to shut up. (which I did)*

Some were extremely skeptical of my claim that CNN was engaging in blog driven Guerrilla marketing, “What, besides pure speculation, links this to CNN or Time Warner?" asks Brooks Jackson, the director of FactCheck.org. "It could be anybody." Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales argued, “Trace the ip number to somewhere or someone interesting, and you've got a story.  As it is, you've got spammers acting in ways that are incomprehensible.” Wales concludes, “Tinfoil hats and black helicopters have more credibility, to my mind.” However, one expert disagrees with Wales’s judgment of the spam. Describing the strategy of the alleged CNN spammers, the blog Spamroll asserts, “Frankly, the premise of the suspicion, and the way it was done, make a heck of a lot of sense.”

The vast majority of the bloggers and publications were not so as quick Jackson and Wales to discredit the story. Though only a minority of them delivered a guilty verdict to CNN; far fewer were willing to argue that CNN was innocent.

Coming from Wired? You'll probably want to read my original article on CNN comment spam. In addition, all of my posts relating to this story have been classified under Guerrilla Spam.

We now return to blogging with the regular and conspicious lack of planning, foresight, or purpose.

Man claims CNN messed with his Blog, is the headline in the UK Inquirer (not to be confused with The National Enquirer). The inquirer reports:

That's the remarkable claim of Nick Lewis at smart campaigns.com, here CNN is spamming blogs in a sophisticated Google attack designed to lower the rank of posts critical of CNN, by introducing spam into the comment stream.

True, that was part of my story, however I seem to remember deciding to include the word "may" in the lead sentence that introduced the idea:

Most alarmingly, CNN may have also left malicious keywords at least 3 out of 13 with the intent of using google's keyword stuffing detectors to censor them.

What difference does one little word like "may" make... Oh well, surely the Inquirer would mention the heart of the story; using guerrilla tactics to create buzz in the blogosphere. After all, this story doesn't work without that crucial part:

They are also trying to post press releases to well-read blogs, it is claimed.

No, I don't remember claiming that they were trying to post press releases to well-read blogs. I remember noting that the "news article" they left me read like a press release. However, these articles are always found with the guerrilla spam, and not all of the spam included these "articles". So actually, no: CNN isn't going around posting naked press releases, and that was never my claim.

My accusations against CNN are not politically motivated. I am not, and never will be connected to any right wing attack groups. I am, in fact, actively seeking ways to use the blogosphere as a weapon against right wing attack groups. I am the founder and chief administrator of one of the blogosphere's most well known left wing alliances. I am also listed partner and ally of the Progressive Democrats of America. I've been accused of many things in my day, but I've never been accused of being aright-wing henchman. My motivation is simple: I don't like the idea of always having to second guess whether someone is real, or a marketer. The idea of a major network using blackhat techniques to influence search engines makes me uncomfortable. It was my judgement that this behavior needed to be stopped as quickly as possible. Thus, I decided to make my case, for the record.

My investigation into CNN's possible guerrilla marketing campaign went national today. In the past 6 hours, the story has been picked up by some little names like Wonkette, Metafilter, TechDirt, and Ad-Land. Since this story is spreading like wildfire, CNN's PR people will likely respond to my request for a denial or confirmation. My guess is that they will deny it.

Anyhow, while I wait for the verdict, I wanted to answer a question I recently received: "why does 10 spams mean anything when there are over 10 million weblogs?"

First of all, most of the blogs in that statistic are dead, and haven't been updated in years. As I mentioned earlier, these spams have targeted mid-to-high level bloggers. CNN appears to have ignored all but the top 1000 bloggers (I'm #876 last time I checked).

So we take 13/10,000,000 to 13/1000 and we have something that seems more significant. Now consider how many blogs have even discussed CNN at any length? According to Blog Pulse, CNN is mentioned on every day on average by 0.15% of the 10,032,827 blogs its identified. Read this list of the posts that Blog Pulse is using to create that statistic. I am yet to find a case in which CNN is being mentioned as anything besides a source of news.

Is that supposed to be the blogosphere equivalent of finding a decapitated horse’s head in your sheets?

Click here for the full summery of this story. This node is reserved for old notes.

Update: 4/20 7:17AM: NYTimes 2/14/05: CNN Sent Out Targeted Comments and Messages (a.k.a. spam)

The New York Times reported that CNN's public information division actually carried out a targeted response (or spams, depending on how you look at it) to the mob of bloggers attacking Eason Jordan: (read full post)

Update: 420 6:30AM: 3/18 Marketwatch: A Business Context for the CNN Guerrilla Spam

Jon Friedman writes on CNN's attention to bloggers:

CNN is trying something -- anything -- to help it create a buzz. The Time Warner (TWX: news, chart, profile) unit, in its never-ending quest to establish an identity that will enable the network to topple arch-rival Fox News (FOX: news, chart, profile) , is betting that enough people will gravitate to the new show[Inside the Blogs].

Update: 4 New Spams Found (4/19)

Update: Spams 2,3: http://stupidevilbastard.com/index/seb/comments/5143/#c30100 My friends we have case #2 of CNN spam. And what's this? I do believe its case #3: http://www.thesakeofargument.com/archives/001084.html (4/18)

Initial Conclusion:

This spam is a form of guerrilla marketing that is designed to minimize the amount of damage the blogosphere can have on a brand. The guerrilla marketer's rifle is a piece of spam... the spam contains 3 items, a casually written comment from a "real" person[1], and a news article about the product that might leave either information or a more positive impression about the brand. But this part of the spam is actually the Guerrilla's second line of defense against an opinion that might hurt the image of their brand.

1. There exists a possibility that they use this "real" person to exploit people's reluctace to censor.

These guerrilla's are -- in fact -- not trying to improve their brand's image. Rather, they are trying to limit the amount of information that might tarnish their brand's image. Thus, they include a string keywords that are generated to oversaturate the the keywords on the page, and therefore give most search engine's the impression that someone is trying to boost their page rank by using the oldest trick in the book: keyword stuffing. Almost every search engine will punish stuffing keywords severely. When successful, they've achieved a solid business-driven goal: minimizing the amount of information that might tarnish the public's perception of their brand.

Although the spam I received was clearly in CNN's favor, I have no proof. And I think that the marketers know that they are in the clear, regardless of the fact that it points so obviously to CNN.

This new strategy has a number of advantages:

1. For the most part, bloggers do not pay attention to old content, so if they leave a spam on a month old post, most likely, the blogger will never notice that it no longer brings in traffic. And, if the keywords don't work, at least they have their message to cancel out the negative effect of the post in question

2. Its cost effective, all they have to do is surf google looking for blog posts that have a negative opinion of their brand, and then drop the guerrilla message, and the search terms. The entire process takes only a minute, and could be done by a contractor who is not connected to them in anway for very little money.

3. Where as most spam will cause trouble for the spammer, this sort of spam has one key advantage. Its targeted, and directly relates to the content; thus, for "CNN" the marketers could make a significant impact, and leave less than 25 spams all together. Although the tactic will make bloggers angry, the marketers know that the majority of the public won't even understand how it works, or care. In addition, the marketers can always argue: "Look, you have open comments, and its your responsibility to protect them; we're just giving you our opinion, and show me the money you have for that attorney if you don't like it".

4. The marketers do not have to make a sales pitch, and no one knows they are being advertised to. After all, since the "advertisment" is the absense of information, and a successful delievery is preventing a customer from being exposed to something that might negatively affect their impression, this form of marketing is extrodinarly effective if done right.

5. The marketers know DAMN well, that its more important for search engines to de-index content that attempts to trick their algorithims, than it is to prevent these marketers from being able to drop a couple posts that were critical of their products.

Either I'm completely crazy, or Time-Warner's marketing team has developed a rather extrodinary strategy to use the blogosphere to its competitive advantage

Update: 4/18 5:39PM: John Partilla: Guerrilla marketing extraordinaire and President of Time Warner Global Marketing

Meet our perfect suspect: John Partilla. He took over Time Warner's global marketing team in June 2004. Prior to that position, he was the founder and chief executive of Brand Buzz, a firm that specialized in guerrilla marketing and valued at $100 million dollars. Now, this is really interesting: The Time Warner website refers to his firm Brand Buzz as a "creative solutions agency". Everywhere else, people call them specialists in guerrilla and viral marketing.

So taking this back to our young upstart D'Arcy (discussed in the update below), perhaps this brings new meaning to his title "Chief Creative Officer." So, basically, we now have our perfect suspects. The question is: were they framed?

Update: 4/18 4:40PM: Chief Creative Officer? How Orwellian...

I've been doing some research into the background of AOL-Time-Warner's marketing team. Found out some interesting info. Late last summer Time Warner's Announced that their Global Marketing Group would be "entirely restructured" (read: everyone got fired). In particular, this quote caught my interest, "Mark D'Arcy has been named chief creative officer"(italics mine). What is a" Chief Creative Officer", you might be wondering? 33 year old D'Arcy describes his goal as being "to put together more robust ideas for our customers that take full advantage of the company's global assets in innovative ways." I think D'Arcy's title is a misnomer; it should be Chief Buzzword Officer. Chief Buzzword Officers are masters of creating robust and scalable solutions at the speed of internet-enabled business; and working with assets in innovative, client-centered ways...

Joking aside, it seems that if CNN is using spam, most likely it will be the work of their restructured Global Marketing Group. In addition, this is not a strategy I see coming from an old timer. D'Archy, at 33 and obviously sharp as they come, fits the bill of someone might be willing to experiment with the huge possibilites of marketing in our new media enviroment through the prevention of information, not in the distribution of it. Hell, that's the strategy the GOP's media machine has been using for over a decade. Of course, I might just be insane.

Update: 4/18 12:03AM

As it would turns out... a set of stuffed keywords are an extremely hard item to find using a search engine. I'm know I wasn't the only target... and there will probably be more targets. But, the moment google gets a chance to index an attacked site, we'll lose the page from the index -- and most likely, every other search engine will follow suit. I have a bad feeling that Stalin might be cackling down in hell, right now. And with that though, I'm calling it a day. BTW, if you've just arrived in the middle of this investigation, you'll proabably want to start at the bottom of this post.

Update: 4/17 11:29PM

Westfield, Massachusetts... its historical town; most jobs are either retail and manufacturing. There isn't a single listed provider of Internet services, no P.R. or marketing consultants or companies... and in short, it isalmost too perfect of a dead end...

Somewhere down there is a head that contains the answers that put this all together. It could have been some 14 year old kid who I suppose will take credit for inventing a censor-spam. Or, it could be a contractor who is quitely recieving a check from AOL-time-warner. Either way, it looks like I'll have to find another way to connect the dots. Not to mention, I doubt that bastard will be dropping me any more of these spams anytime soon.

Update: 4/17 9:03PM Central

Though I still can't jump to conclusions, further research has greatly increased my certainty that CNN used spam as a method of censorship.

Perhaps the most important development is that, I've discovered the repeated keywords to be far more poisonous than I had originally thought.

Normally, it seems a search engine will run across, say, a page title "how to plant a better garden", and then find 100 links to Texas Hodem... though I have not verified this, the search engines have probably found a way to identify comment spam as unintentional; in such cases,they probably don't punish the page quite as severely for attempting to trick the search engines.

However, in this case since the post is about CNN, and Blogs (both page titles, and headers contain those terms), finding the word "blog" and "CNN" repeated 8 times in the comment section is likely to be treated as intentional keyword stuffing. Most likely, this carries heavy penalties for whatever piece of content is 'censor-spammed'... (please tell me that we are not going to soon have a term for this...) which may be why i can't find any pages that have received a similar spam attacks on google.

In addition, the keywords that were most heavily stuffed into this piece of spam happen to be the strongest keywords for the page. In otherwords, these repeated keywords could not have been screaming "hey! Google! Please take this page out of your index!" louder.

Finally, my records show that it took 1 to 2 minutes for the content to be delivered. This is much slower than a spam bot. This suggest that a human being is actually selecting which content to attack.

The spammer is most likely using a popular SEO program from the 90's in addition to a simple keyword analyzer tool to produce the poisonous content; and indeed, it does infact appear to be the perfect brew if you want a blog post to just sort of "disappear". Spooky huh?

Original Post

Today, I recieved a bizarre comment on my blog regarding a (badly written) rant wrote about CNN. After some investigation, I am almost certain (I don't have absolute proof) that CNN is actively censoring blogs that have low opinions of their station; in addition, they seem to be also engaging in very clumsy attempt at gorrila marketing.

Now, at first, I thought I was being paranoid; after all, the search that appears to have led them to my blog was "CNN blogs", where I was ranked #131. However, upon scanning through all of the google's results, I realized that my post, at #131 was in fact the highest ranked blog post that expressed a negative opinion about CNN (this is key) abd allowed comments. That seems very fishy to me... are negative opinions about CNN THAT rare? Or, is CNN manipulating google, and assuming blogger's won't notice the comment that they leave in their archived content?

I know this seems far fetched... However, take a look at 1/10th of the string that I found at the end of the comment (google will punish repeated words, so I've inserted dashes to be safe:

n-e-ws ne-ws n-ews ne-w-s blo-g bl-og cn-n c-nn c-nn clo-g blo-g cn-n cn-n c-nn cn-n bl-og -blog blo-g blog- bl-og bl-og

I'm not an expert on google's search engine, however I do know that google punishes sites (sometimes severely) when they attempt to trick its algorithms. I don't think I've seen a site use this method of boosting google rankings since last decade!

Anyhow, like I said before, I'm not 100% sure of this. However, the notion of a major news network purposefully silencing opinions via by delivering spam that angers google does not sit well for me. If I am wrong about this, than thank god. Otherwise I consider this to be an extremely alarming taste of what could become part of a new generation of censorship methods.

Please leave a comment if you have any insight on this. I've left the text of the comment below, if anyone is interested (javascript and stuffed keywords removed). Its worth reading just for how bad of a gorrila marketing attempt it is. I'll update ya'll as soon as I know more.