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Report: Facebook Game Addicts "Paid" to Oppose Health Care Reform

The Apocalypse must be fast approaching, that's the only explanation that can help me wrap my mind around this. A health insurance lobbying group is reportedly paying Facebook users in virtual, "in-game" currency to send a letter opposing health-care reform legislation to their Congressional representative.

This according to the blog Business Insider today, in a report that's frustratingly short on details but remains plausible.

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The Context

TechCrunch did an in-depth investigative series on the sleaziness of the in-game advertising industry this Fall. Market leader Zynga, maker of the home-wrecking game that turns Facebook users into zombified farmers of imaginary crops (Farmville), was the primary target of that report. Advertisers pay users in virtual goods, like fertilizer for their imaginary crops, for signing up for offers to purchase real goods for real cash (with a credit card). Other offers include market research surveys and apparently political action. The games are psychologically addictive, there's an art to making an effective one, and so payment with in-game currency is very compelling.

Zynga claimed that it was cleaning up its advertising market and that such virtual-goods-for-action offers never made up a substantial portion of its revenue, anyway. None the less, it's not hard to imagine this same industry being used for nefarious political purposes. Not hard at all.

The Accusation

Business Insider cites the CEO of casual gaming startup OMGPOP, who didn't name the game the health-care offers appeared in but blamed ad serving startup Gambit. Gambit says there's no evidence they served up the offer and says they prohibit advertising on "hot political topics." The report is an unusual bit of original investigation by Business Insider, which is a blog that does best at finding and excerpting at length from other peoples' reporting around the web.

Got that? An aggregation-heavy blog quotes a Flash game CEO blaming a casual game ad network (who denies it) for serving up in-game currency offers from a health-insurance front lobbying group to millions of people who spend their time doing things like watering crops that don't really exist on Facebook to instead send letters to politicians opposing government reform of the health care system. That long sentence went from vacuous to real serious, there at the very end.

We're talking to people in the casual gaming advertising field and they say that something like this is very possible, though no one else has seen these ads. This may be nothing but rumor and speculation right now, or it may really be happening, but it's not an implausible scenario at all. Update: We just heard from another casual gaming ad network that says it was approached with this ad and another calling people to oppose immigration reform late this Summer but declined to run the ads.

The Consequences

There's something very sci-fi about this though, isn't there? Apparently some people look at Facebook's 350 million users and see an army of minions that can be paid in other-worldly, ephemeral "cash" to do a benefactor's bidding.

Combine this with Facebook's radical redrawing of its social contract with users today, changing the default setting on status messages from being private to being exposed to everyone online, and Facebook looks a little more dangerous than it did before.

Facebook hasn't yet responded to our request for comment on this story.

Gentlemen of Bacongo

Photographer Daniele Tamagni's new book Gentlemen of Bacongo captures the fascinating subculture of the Congo in which men (and a few women) dress in designer and handmade suits and other luxury items. The movement, called Le Sape, combines French styles from their colonial roots and the individual's (often flamboyant) style. Le Sapeurs, as they're called, wear pink suits and D&G belts while living in the slums of this coastal African region.

In interviews with some notable sapeurs, Tamagni unearths the complex and varied rules and standards of Le Sape, short for Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, or the Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People. Sapeur Michel comments on the strange combination of poverty and fashion, "A Congolese sapeur is a happy man even if he does not eat, because wearing proper clothes feeds the soul and gives pleasure to the body."

The sapeurs engage the extremes between classes while injecting their individual perspectives into the conversation, establishing an identity within the larger social narrative they've helped construct.

This anthropological wonder combines interviews with Sapeurs along with a preface by menswear designer Paul Smith and Tamagni's anecdotes throughout. Focused on Sapeurs from Brazzaville and Kinshasa in Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tamagni's title comes from the Bakongo, an African tribe of people along the eastern shore of the continent. At just about seven-inches tall, the book's compact in size but the colors are bright, matching the outrê style of Le Sape. Tamagni outlines rules as they relate to color, as well as the proper styles of tie, the strong religious convictions and non-violent culture of Le Sape and myriad other facets of this phenomenon.

Tamagni's photographs capture the style, the “contradictions and paradoxes" and tight-knit social networks of the Sapeurs. He highlights the proper use of cigars—"even if you don't smoke you need to light it"—the strict use of color (only three colors may be combined in an outfit), and the deep spiritual and moral roots of Le Sape. "When the sapeur expresses himself through the harmony of his clothes, he is returning his admiration to God."

Of course, the poverty and political instability of the Congo makes the profound admiration and respect for Parisian fashion all the more distinct.

Gentlemen of Bacongo also examines the strange merging of colonial and Congolese culture. Tamagni notes Sapeur Salvador Hassan “thinks that a real sapeur needs to be cultivated and speak fluently, but also have a solid moral ethic: that means beyond the appearance and vanity of smart, expensive clothing there is the moral nobility of the individual." Says Hassan, "The label is not important, what is important is to be able to dress depending on the taste of the individual."

Purchase Gentlemen of Bacongo from Amazon or Powell's.

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Uninsured Twice as Likely to Die in ER

A new Harvard study has uncovered another disturbing reality of America’s broken health care system: Trauma patients without insurance are almost twice as likely to die in the emergency room. Researchers were unable to determine why, but hospitals’ eagerness to transfer the uninsured could be to blame.  —PZS

AP via MSNBC:

Uninsured patients with traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, were almost twice as likely to die in the hospital as similarly injured patients with health insurance, according to a troubling new study.

The findings by Harvard University researchers surprised doctors and health experts who have believed emergency room care was equitable.

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Finding the laws that govern us

Starting today, we're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the "Legal opinions and journals" radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of "separate but equal" facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. To understand how an opinion has influenced other decisions, you can explore citing and related cases using the Cited by and Related articles links on search result pages. As you read an opinion, you can follow citations to the opinions to which it refers. You can also see how individual cases have been quoted or discussed in other opinions and in articles from law journals. Browse these by clicking on the "How Cited" link next to the case title. See, for example, the frequent citations for Roe v. Wade, for Miranda v. Arizona (the source of the famous Miranda warning) or for Terry v. Ohio (a case which helped to establish acceptable grounds for an investigative stop by a police officer).

As we worked to build this feature, we were struck by how readable and accessible these opinions are. Court opinions don't just describe a decision but also present the reasons that support the decision. In doing so, they explain the intricacies of law in the context of real-life situations. And they often do it in language that is surprisingly straightforward, even for those of us outside the legal profession. In many cases, judges have gone quite a bit out of their way to make complex legal issues easy to follow. For example, in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court justices present a fascinating and easy-to-follow debate on the legality of internment of natural born citizens based on their ancestry. And in United States v. Ramirez-Lopez, Justice Kozinski, in his dissent, illustrates the key issue of the case using an imagined good-news/bad-news dialogue between the defendant and his attorney.

We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of several pioneers, who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate herself about the laws of the land: Tom Bruce (Cornell LII), Jerry Dupont (LLMC), Graham Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray (AustLII), Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org), Daniel Poulin (LexUM), Tim Stanley (Justia), Joe Ury (BAILII), Tim Wu (AltLaw) and many others. It is an honor to follow in their footsteps. We would also like to acknowledge the judges who have built this cathedral of justice brick by brick and have tried to make it accessible to the rest of us. We hope Google Scholar will help all of us stand on the shoulders of these giants.

Posted by Anurag Acharya, Distinguished Engineer

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