"I posted on Yahoo! under a pseudonym because I had fun doing it. Many people post on bulletin boards using pseudonyms." He said that "I never intended any of those postings to be identified with me."
"The views articulated by rahodeb sometimes represent what I actually believed and sometimes they didn't. Sometimes I simply played 'devil's advocate' for the sheer fun of arguing. Anyone who knows me realizes that I frequently do this in person, too."
Me too. Hate to break it to you, but Catte isn't my real, true, legal name. And sometimes I post edgy opinions. And I have fun.
"Would Whole Foods buy OATS?" Rahodeb asked, using Wild Oats' stock symbol. "Almost surely not at current prices. What would they gain? OATS locations are too small." Rahodeb speculated that Wild Oats eventually would be sold after sliding into bankruptcy or when its stock fell below $5. A month later, Rahodeb wrote that Wild Oats management "clearly doesn't know what it is doing .... OATS has no value and no future."
http://online.wsj.com/...
Kai Ryssdal: There's an unusual twist today in what was shaping up to be a fairly routine anti-trust case. The Federal Trade Commission's been trying to block the organic grocery chain Whole Foods from buying its smaller rival, Wild Oats.
We learned this morning the FTC may have the ammunition it needs to do that. Turns out the CEO of Whole Foods has been quite vocal on an anonymous Internet chat site. Marketplace's Sam Eaton explains.
Sam Eaton: It turns out John Mackey, the colorful cofounder and CEO of Whole Foods, had a fondness for online chatter. Not only does Mackey post regular entries on his company blog, but up until last year, he was also a frequent visitor to Yahoo's financial chat boards.
Mackey used the pseudonym "rahodeb," a variation of his wife's name, Deborah.
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/...
But Whole Foods' reputation and its troubled $565m bid to take over main rival Wild Oats have both suffered a setback with revelations that John Mackey, its co-founder and chief executive, had been anonymously attacking his eventual takeover target on an investors' online message board.
Charles Elson, a professor of corporate ethics at the University of Delaware, described Mr Mackey's behaviour as "bizarre".
He added: "A chatroom is not a forum for a CEO of a public company to discuss his business and the industry. I don't think this is going to be viewed very positively by many people in the corporate community."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
Interesting legal, ethical, and simply personal issues here.
Should a CEO, or lawyer, or doctor, or teacher, or plumber (or Catte) have an anonymous handle on a blog or chat room? What if they know things in their real life persona that the rest of the community wouldn't know? What if the things they post could influence others to unknowingly act in ways that would benefit the poster?
This reviewing world gets murky fast. The slam review is followed by a later reviewer who jumped in with "I don't know what that guy is talking about, it fits perfect!" Then another reviewer says it doesn't fit, and yet another answers "I don't know about all the reviews saying it doesn't fit." Which of these are honest, and which are tainted? Are the positives just the manufacturer, and the negatives competitors? If you explore the reviews, not just in Amazon but in just about any site that offers user reviews, you'll see some that divide obviously into manufacturers vs. competitors. And there are lots of reviewers slamming other reviewers. "Don't believe so-in-so who said ..." is all over product review sites....The blog world is right in the middle of a pseudonymity crisis, today. People are buying and selling blog comments and favorable product reviews in blogs. People are posting sloppy, deceptive copies tagged to maximize the ad revenue from the ads around them. There are software packages designed solely to help bloggers block comment spam that assaults popular blogs as would-be comments done by software, not people, plugging products. Some bloggers use pseudonyms to plug themselves in social media tagging sites like Digg and stumbleupon.
Ultimately, as with Mackey, other people influencing stock prices, and the companies plugging their own products and knocking competitors in review sites and blogs, there's no good answer to the problem of social media distorted by commercial goals. Let the reader and believer beware.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
This story will continue to raise questions in the days to come. Lot's to think about here.
If nothing else - this isn't a Cindy Sheehan diary, so it's worth something right there, right?