Astroturf

You really can't believe everything you read? Even on Facebook?

So I was going through some of my nightly Facebook reading Tuesday night and I see that one of my friends has "liked" a group on Facebook called "Defend My Dividend". Okay, it's obviously a conservative group, and they're against taxes, which they have every right to do.

At least, they're against one particular kind of taxes. This group is taking a bold stand against any increase in the rate at which dividend income is taxed. You see, unlike taxable income that you work for, dividends are taxed at a much lower rate. If you receive taxable dividends and your general tax bracket is 15% or 25%, your tax rate on your dividend income is 0%. If you are taxed at any higher tax rate (and remember, your income has to be over $87,000 to hit that rate) your dividend income is taxed at 15%; it never goes higher than that.

As you can see, dividends are taxed much lower than income that you work for, apparently because your investments get tired so easily that it isn't fair to tax them the same as a working person. President Obama has proposed to tax dividends the same as ordinary income for individuals earning over $200,000 or couples earning over $250,000. As you know if you've been paying attention, 98% of your fellow Americans have incomes below these levels and about 2% have incomes above. In other words, this proposal would apply to hardly anybody.

But let's go back to Facebook. Somehow this group on Facebook already has 95,000 "likes". Here are some of the comments:

We just can not have that. Baby Boomers are the life of rbis country. We deserve our reward.

Many seniors depend on the dividends to help make ends meet. They worked hard to save money and invest. That includes me. Now our elected Savior that is trying to take that away from us. It will also hurt our economy since people will not invest in the companies to expand their business. And why should they invest when Obama's gov. is taking away income that helps them make ends meet.

Please stop we hurting alot now. Please stop

You have to feel for these people, right? After all, they are so concerned that their $250,000 income might be hit by a tax they don't want to pay that they've banded together, created a group on Facebook, and recruited many of their fellow dividend-getters to join them.

It really makes you wonder: Who are these selfless people who would go to all that effort to set up a group on Facebook, with no motive but to improve the tax system for all of us?

Well, looky here:

Defend My Dividend is a national grassroots advocacy campaign dedicated to stopping a dividend tax hike. The campaign is sponsored by various associations, organizations, and companies, with the support of members, employees, retirees, and shareholders. The Defend My Dividend Web site is maintained by the Edison Electric Institute, in partnership with the Alliance for Savings & Investment and the American Gas Association.

Surprise, surprise! It's not real people at all. In fact, Defend My Dividend is just an astroturf front for the electric and gas industries.

So that would make the people who sign their web page, and "like" it, and post ignorant comments as though they really stand to lose (because they have over $200,000 in income, remember?) what?

I believe the technical term would be "dupes".

Who's your friend?

That quiz, survey, or game you just did on Facebook: is it a harmless entertainment, a marketing ploy, or even a virus?

If you're like half the known world, including me, you're on Facebook. Maybe as a regular user, maybe someone with an account that is barely active, but just there. (If your profile pic is a blank silhouette, you know who you are.) Part of the appeal of Facebook is the low barriers to entry: it's full of applications, not produced by Facebook, that will do everything from ask you what Grateful Dead song you are or the five worst movies you've ever seen, to giving you the chance to "send" drinks, flowers, or other virtual trinkets to your friends (and, in the process, spamming said friends with pointless messages).

But there's more. First, the linked nature of Facebook's friends network means that applications can grow and spread exponentially, so a popular, or even a problem, application can spread through the whole network fast. Second, although all the apps give you a chance to "Allow" the application, the odds are that most users don't read the disclosure before hitting the "Allow" button.

Would it make a difference if they did? Maybe not.

Here are a couple of examples. There's a quiz that presents you with a set of questions about your health that will then tell you what your "true" age is. My snarky response to one of my friends was that it's pretty easy to determine your true age: subtract your date of birth from the present date and that will give you your true age, generally expressed in years.

According to today's Times, though, the quiz does more than present you with some tips to improve your health. You might not have thought about what happens to the answers you submit to the quiz, though, but the quiz makers did. According to the Times:

But while RealAge promotes better living through nonmedical solutions, the site makes its money by selling better living through drugs.

Pharmaceutical companies pay RealAge to compile test results of RealAge members and send them marketing messages by e-mail. The drug companies can even use RealAge answers to find people who show symptoms of a disease — and begin sending them messages about it even before the people have received a diagnosis from their doctors.

Yes, even though Oprah Winfrey's doctor friend Mehmet Oz likes it, and you can find out what Oprah's RealAge is, when you take the quiz you're turning over private health information to the drug companies. Do you really want that?

Or, take another example, PicDoodle. It looks like a regular Facebook app, and it claims that it enables you to make hilarious pictures of your friends. In fact, if you Allow the application it will create blank pictures of your friends, tag them, and cause the Facebook photos app to send your friends reports that they've been tagged, and they can see it if they allow the application. Before long, the virus is spread throughout Facebook.

Facebook claims it's not a virus, but I don't believe it.

So what's the message here? The same as we've been told about the whole Internet for years: be careful, know who you're dealing with, and don't give out any information you don't want to be made public.

Oh, and my "Real Age"? Fifty-five, but I'm expecting it to go up to fifty-six in a couple of months.