CULTURAS IN VITRO
Studios' Web 'Plants' Lead to an Ethical Thicket
Ever since Harry Knowles burst to prominence with Aintitcoolnews.com, the Internet has blossomed with hundreds of movie geek Web sites, each one crammed with its own oddball assortment of news, reviews and message boards devoted to "Star Wars," Quentin Tarantino and other pressing matters. For movie fans, the sites represent authentic participatory democracy--everyone's opinion or obsession carries equal weight.
But earlier this year, Chris Parry, a 32-year-old writer and ex-production manager who runs the site efilmcritic.com, began noticing a lot of very inauthentic postings. They read like outright publicity plugs, or what Net denizens call "plants," most of them touting films released by Universal Pictures. [...]
Parry's movie site wasn't the only one being "seeded" with fake fan messages. Brian Renner, a 17-year-old high school student who runs the site themovieinsider.com from his home in the Detroit suburbs, received identical postings for the films "Undercover Brother" and "Red Dragon." When he ran a check on their IP addresses, they were the same as for the messages at Parry's site: Universal Pictures. [...]
Renner discovered that the messages came from the same IP address, one registered to Paramount Pictures. Both Parry and Renner say they tried contacting the studios and e-mailed queries to the people sending the suspicious postings, but never received a response. They suspect other studios of planting messages as well, but most postings were disguised by the use of a separate Internet service provider.