“Watch out Uncle Spam is watching what your up to on Social Media!”

Check out this PowerPoint presentation I found on Google. It is entitled – Social Media -2007 Web Managers Workshop- by: The World Bank-US Government

It was presented to conference of Government webmasters and IT professionals earlier this year.

The presentation starts off friendly enough: “To encourage All Govt. Staff to use RSS readers to more easily monitor Government Properties online.”

Then it starts taking a darker turn when the Government starts to express how very scared they really are of the power of social media. So scared in fact , that they are providing their employees with tips on Social Media Optimization or better said Social Media Manipulation. How to’s on inserting themselves into the social “conversation” to manipulate and drown out any content they deem inappropriate. I believe they are walking a very fine line by encouraging employees to consciously and artificially drown the social space with propaganda. And they should be put on blast on all Social Media spaces to make sure to out the Government moles placed there solely to bury content or vote down videos on Youtube.

According the The World Bank and US Government Presentation :

“A Successful Social Conversation is:

· Authenticity

· Passion

· Trusting Staff ( Accidental Spokesperson)

· Putting Spin on Hold ”

· Putting Spin on Hold???, WTF, Is this one of the rules or pillars I missed?

And the presentation even goes on to encourage Government employees to submit videos to YouTube, and edit Wikipedia. Yes that’s right you read that right , the presentation put together by the Govt. and World Bank , encourages its employees to post videos to YouTube and edit Wikipedia on Govt. and taxpayer time.  I’m damm sure they are not going to post anti government messages. (Remember the article where the Govt. was outed for editing wiki?) I mean for a corporation to do this, even though its a bit slimy I can deal, but for the Government to instruct its webmasters to purposely subvert the will of the people in the social space is BULLSHIT! 

I mean shit, here it is, plain as day, the government sanctioning the manipulation of OUR social space.

Now, some might think it a leap to go from encouraging edits on Wiki to sanctioning manipulation.

Well I am one of the ones that say no its is not such a big leap, because how many of you think these Govt. employees are going to go back and post videos on the casualties of war in Iraq, or documentaries about the suicide rate of Iraq veterans when back home(which happens to be about 80-120 /week), or submit an article to Digg about how General Patrues and the surge are working out dandy. No, they are going to post videos purposely designed and fabricated to drown out the other videos, posts and content the administration doesn’t like.

They are going to post Pro Government propaganda and pollute our bandwidth with the worst kind of spam, Government Spam!

I mean the presentation even highlights how the social media apace is causing them to lose control of their image. (See slide 21)

It’s not like I didn’t know that Big Brother was watching us, but I just gives me such an icky feeling to read it and see it detailed like this.

Also pay close attention to the slides detailing where the government employees should go to monitor the opinions, posts, videos, podcasts, and profiles related to this administration and The World Bank.

Technoratti, Google Blog, Delicous, Wiki, etc….

Look familiar, yes I’m there everyday, for hours sometimes. If this PPT is available publicly, imagine what’s being done covertly to track and subvert anti government posts, videos, etc. And what’s being done to gather and monitor those found to be associated with anything even remotely anti government or against the grain of their message.

Look at slide # 23- 29 it upset them just to have the holes in Paul Wolfowitz socks written about. So imagine what levels they are willing to go to artificially insert them selves into our social space to drown out more serious messages about the statistics and reports our Government is not telling us about. What this presentation is purporting they do, goes at the very core of the beauty of the social space. This is the worst kind of Spam, Uncle Spam!!

URL’s to Presentation:

Your document is publicly viewable at: http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dqs5h9k_104dk9gcn

Or Check out where I found it.

www.usa.gov/webcontent/documents/Social_media_government_web_managers.ppt

Here is another presentation as well which has some interesting .gov link stats, and discusses Social Media, but not as dark and Orwellian as the previous. This one is focusing more on how the Govt. wants to use Social Media and the web to deliver personalized content.

usaservices.gov/ppts/BevFeb2007.ppt

If you want to try and cool experiment , go to Google, limit your search to file type ppt, and search for a subject. You’ll be astonished by what you find sometimes. And they same goes with other file types.

I guess someone should have told the webmaster of USA.Gov to use disallow if he didn’t want Google to crawl it!!