The Englaro case in Italy has personally affected me a lot but this is not a personal blog so I will not put my thoughts here.
Yet there are some important conclusions for the role of web in politics which i would like to highlight.
The story is such: big debate in Italy on whether this poor girl was to be allowed to die or not after 17 years in coma. Newspapers, of course, run forum, online debate, online surveys.
So here is what happened at Italy’s largest newspaper, Corriere della Sera, which is an important piece of evidence on how to abuse public participation. If you can’t read italian, I recommend you install the GoogleTranslate button.
Basically, the survey started, large majority in favour of letting the girl die untile they reached 50K votes in in 3 days . Experience tells them that normally results after 5K votes are stable. But here not! Suddenly a reverse of fortune happens: in one day 50K votes are casted and the votes gets back in balance.
The Corriere is very transparent about this: because of this suspicious behaviour, they removed the survey from the homepage. And in fact, once removed from the homepage, the vote went back as they were before the anomaly.
So the vote was clearly manipulated in order to show Italians were splitted on the issue. And I am sure this helped to raise doubts in people, making them think twice.
Why is this important? it shows how parties have understood the importance of the web and actively manipulate conversations in order to influence results. Let’s keep in mind this. It happens also in comments, not only in votes.
My final question is: does this mean online conversation and participation are unlikely to work if they address really important and controversial issues?
Or will the governance tools and transparent behaviour, such as the good approach of the Corriere della Sera, effective enough to ensure these debates are genuine?
My answer is that it depends on the quality of the democracy and the civic skills of the citizens. In Italy, the majority of people will not look at this article, will not care about the manipulation, and overall it will appear people were divided, so manipulation works and web conversations don’t. In other countries, such a blatant manipulation would have backfired because of popular revolt.
Ultimately is the old linus’s law “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow“”. Countries without enough critical eyes will see web-based participation become a manipulative tool.
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Policy and technology: a "longue durée" view 
February 10, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Interesting. Online voting on popular issues are often conducted in a way that makes it easy to manipulate the vote. A minimal requirement is that voters should register an email address to be able to confirm the vote by email. This slows down the voting speed and you can at least check if multiple accounts from the same domain are casting votes.
Anyone knows that the current practice of “quick vote” buttons on web pages creates almost useless results.
February 10, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Thanks peter. technologically this is easily solved but the issue is its real life application. Not everyone knows that – maybe everyone in the tech world. also, the slowing down could limit participation – which would then make participation less relevant.
My view is in “historical” terms: will manipulation take over real participation? I’m always looking for weak signs 🙂
February 10, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Your question is interesting and I agree that digital crowd manipulation (DCM?) may increase in the future. If people believe that there are 50K voters in favor of an issue they may of course adjust their own view of the topic.
Market research methods needs to be transparent. Maybe there need to be more obvious manipulation cases that come to the attention of newspaper readers?
February 11, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Thank you David for sharing this!! I supposed that something like you described was happened.
Too bad I read your post too late! I wrote (with Bernardo Parrella) a post in GlobalVoiceOnline – Italy: the right to die –
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/02/10/56592/
about the Englaro case and I could insert a link to this post!!
February 11, 2009 at 9:59 pm
honestly i wouldn’t worry that much about such a small poll “manipulation”, even if some technical adjustments will surely be helpful, many other english news sites routinely use them
of course “net literacy” should be increased everywhere, but we cannot completely avoid such behaviors, or even spam, identity theft, or pickpocketing on the street and so on
IMHO the key is always more participation and transparency: when lots of actual people can discuss/vote the issue in many open places someone (news sites managers included) will surely catch a “bad apple” and we’ll quickly change places or tools