Bonum Certa Men Certa

IBM PR is 'Shaping' the News (and Asks to Remain Secret)

IBM logo on media



Summary: PR staff from IBM tries to affect coverage in Techrights, then asks not to be mentioned as a source

IBM has been keeping a somewhat low profile since all the antitrust trouble it was having. But the company is vast and behind the scenes it has mysterious ways of working (whilst also silently working to preserve software patents). Last night I spent about an hour on the phone confronting IBM. Without getting into all the details, the gist is that we have a policy of rejecting PR manipulation of stories as they develop. IBM seems to think otherwise and we do not appreciate it. This is insulting and degrading. Any journalist who works at the behest of PR people should feel violated and used. People are not pawns of other people on the payroll of large multinationals and they mustn't be, either. Hitherto we have covered the mischief of Microsoft PR agencies and the only credit we can give to IBM is that it does not do all of its PR via proxies.



We can probably be described as "pro-IBM" because the company has been good to Linux. In the interest of fairness, however, we would like to explain IBM's weird policy of handling the press, which possibly includes sites like Groklaw. This only delegitimises IBM, which tries to give foresight regarding legal cases. This oughtn't be done.

"All our readers need to know is that IBM is mass-mailing ("spamming" as some would call it) many people with blogs/papers to affect coverage of the Neon case."It was not easy to really gather all of this information and it needed to be verified in person. The PR agent who contacted us tried to avoid admission of error. And it turned out that he does not actually read the site (not regularly), even though it took a long time to get such admissions, which needed the right questions to be asked. When asked the right questions, which had the person avoid answering or first not answering and only later realising that it is better to answer (and verify the suspicions) than to deny, truth came out. All our readers need to know is that IBM is mass-mailing ("spamming" as some would call it) many people with blogs/papers to affect coverage of the Neon case. We would have probably written in sympathy with IBM, but after this experience with IBM we'll skip this opportunity.

It is sad to see IBM stooping so low. It's not as though it's a small business struggling for its survival. It is even worse when the PR agent resorts to asking to "stop the conversation" whenever a hard question is raised yet not letting me off the line for fear of what I would write (trying to almost prevent me from writing about my experiences being contacted by IBM PR). We did have a long argument about the role of PR and how it distorts the news and confuses people (the Gates Foundation, for example, is all about PR). This was discussed scarcely in IRC and Identi.ca, so not much more needs to be said. In general, however, we continue to stress that we are not interested in hearing from PR people. Techrights never received funding and it does not intend to. It is editorially independent and it takes research very seriously.

There is so much more to be said, but it's impossible to summarise one hour of verbal chat in just one post and I wish not to cause harm to any person and/or a family. The bottom line is, IBM should drop the secrecy, it should stop trying to meddle with bloggers/journalists, and it should also start giving a damn about those 'little people' who do not want software monopolies and patent monopolies. Nobody deserves this kind of treatment. And let's not get started with IBM's many bogus PR accounts in Twitter -- those who 'follow' real people with the intention of influencing them. We need to save the press and even social networks from mega-corporations which pretend to be peers and fight for people's mind at the expense of these people. One quarter of everything people buy -- on average -- is marketing, said some recent statistics (sources unknown). When trillions of dollars are spent changing perception it is us who sponsor this and us who are subjected to disinformation. Truth is not relative. PR is the business of changing "truth".

Recent Techrights' Posts

Rust is Starting to Seem More Like Microsoft-hosted "Digital Maoism", Not a Legitimate Effort to Improve Security
Maybe this is very innocent, but they seem to have taken a solid, stable program from a high-profile Frenchman and looked for ways to marry it with GitHub, i.e. Microsoft/NSA
 
Links 08/05/2025: Mass Layoffs at Google Again, India/Pakistan Tensions Continue to Grow, New Pope (US) Selected
Links for the day
"Victory Day" - Part I: That is the Day Microsofters Who Assault Women Pay for Their Actions in Foreign Land (Using "Guns for Hire" Who Attack Their Own Country for American Dollars)
Adding a friend from Microsoft to the docket didn't help
Gemini Links 08/05/2025: Practical Gemini Use Case, Shutdown of the Blanket Fort Webring
Links for the day
Links 08/05/2025: "Slop Presidency", US Government Defunds Public Broadcasting
Links for the day
Lasse Fister, Organiser of Libre Graphics Meeting, Points Out the Code of Conduct is Likely Violated by the Same People Who Promote Codes of Conduct (and Then Bully Him Into Cancelling a Keynote)
I am starting to see Lasse Fister as another victim
LLM Slop Attacks Not Only Sites of Free Software Projects But Also Bug Reporting Systems (Time-wasting, in Effect "DDoS")
Microsoft, the leading purveyor and promoter of slop, is a cancer
The Richard Stallman (RMS) "European Tour" Carries on In Spite of the Nuremberg Incident
Some people spoke about how they saw yesterday's talk
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, May 07, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, May 07, 2025
The CoC Means the Founder of GNU/Linux Cannot Talk and a 72-Year-Old Man With Cancer is Somehow a "Safety" Risk?
Those who don't like RMS are not forced to attend his talks
Gemini Links 07/05/2025: A Shopping Spree and Digital Gardening
Links for the day
Links 07/05/2025: Pegasus Guilty and a Path Towards EU Without Russian Energy
Links for the day
People Used to Talk
If pets can live a measurably happy life without gadgets and "apps", why can't humans?
Outsourcing GNU/Linux to Microsoft GitHub Promoted by Microsoft LLM Slop and Army Officers
Something doesn't seem right
Weaponisation of For-Profit Dockets - Part III: No More Media Lawsuits From Brett Wilson LLP This Year, One Can Only Guess Why
People leak a lot of material to Techrights because they know, based on the track record, that the sources will be protected and whatever gets published will stay online, in full, no matter how stubborn an effort (even lawsuits and blackmail) will be sent its way
Gemini Links 07/05/2025: Adopting GrapheneOS, Further Enshittification of Flickr
Links for the day
Links 07/05/2025: CISA Gutted, Debt-Saddled (Likely Insolvent) 'Open' 'AI' (Proprietary Slop) Faking Its Financial State Again
Links for the day
Finland, Lithuania, and Latvia Fortify Their Digital Border With GNU/Linux
This month's data from statCounter is particularly interesting near the Baltic Sea
The European Patent Office (EPO) Has a Very Profound Corruption Issue, Far More Urgent an Issue Than Pronouns
a rather long document
Richard Stallman Gives Public Talk at Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic
"For programs that you could run, and for network services that could do your own computing, under what circumstances is it reasonable to trust them?"
Today We Turn 18.5
The eighteenth "and a half" anniversary
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, May 06, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, May 06, 2025
Microsoft Finally Admits That XBox is ****
In this case, "enshittification" is an understatement
Another Wave of Microsoft Layoffs Comes Shortly. Microsoft Propaganda Sites and Slopforms Powered by Microsoft LLMs Already Spew Out Face-Saving Nonsense.
Based on last month's leak, some very extensive layoffs are now imminent [...] Perhaps we can expect a lot of noise, some of it spewed out by bots, to distract from or belittle the impending mass layoffs
Ubuntu Becomes Microsoft GitHub, Based on Decision Made by British Army Officer
You're hopeless, Canonical
Slopwatch: Microsoft Slop, Anti-Linux Slop, and IBM Marketing Itself as a Slop Company
Microsoft-controlled LLM spewing out garbage about "Linux"
Links 06/05/2025: Microsoft's Assassination of Skype After Years of Failure, Slop Hallucinations Are Getting Worse
Links for the day
Links 06/05/2025: Changing Places and StarGrid for PalmOS
Links for the day
Windows and Microsoft Causing Serious Data Breaches, Media Rushes to Blame That on "Linux" Somehow
While selling us some rusty old propaganda about how moving to Microsoft GitHub (Rust) will improve security
Making Site Archives More Easily Accessible (Approaching 50,000 Blog Posts)
Efforts to censor us have always backfired badly
Weaponisation of For-Profit Dockets - Part II: Hiding Behind Lawyers and Barristers Who Lack Standards so as to Engage in Classic Corporate Extortion
They're trying to scare people and they misuse their licence to operate
Links 06/05/2025: LLMs/Chatbots Attract More Scrutiny (Getting Worse Over Time), PwC Has Many Layoffs
Links for the day
Thanks for listening. How can this Morse feed be further improved?
Right now any and all feedback on the audio would be helpful
statCounter: Bing's Market Share Lower Right Now Than It Was When LLM Hype Began (With "Bing Chat")
If anybody gains at Google's expense in search, it is BRICS' alternatives such as Yandex
Gemini Links 06/05/2025: Failure and Proxmox Cluster
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, May 05, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, May 05, 2025