Health Insurers Caught Paying Facebook Gamers Virtual Currency To Oppose Reform Bill

[babylonsister]

Health Insurers Caught Paying Facebook Gamers Virtual Currency To Oppose Reform Bill


Health insurance industry trade groups opposed to President Obama's health care reform bill are paying Facebook users fake money -- called "virtual currency" -- to send letters to Congress protesting the bill.

Here's how it's happening:

Facebook users play a social game, like "FarmVille" or "Friends For Sale." They get addicted to it. Eager to accelerate their progress inside the game, the gamers buy "virtual goods" such as a machine gun for "Mafia Wars." But these gamers don't buy these virtual goods with real money. They use virtual currency.

The gamers get virtual currency three ways:

* Winning it playing the games

* Paying for it with real money

* By accepting offers from third-parties -- usually companies like online movie rentals service Netflix -- who agree to give the gamer virtual currency so long as that gamer agrees to try a product or service. This is done through an "offers" provider -- a middleman that brings the companies like Netflix, the Facebook gamemakers, and the Facebook gamemaker's users together.

It's this third method that an anti-reform group called "Get Health Reform Right" is using to pay gamers virtual currency for their support.

Instead of asking the gamers to try a product the way Netflix would, "Get Health Reform Right" requires gamers to take a survey, which, upon completion, automatically sends the following email to their Congressional Rep:

"I am concerned a new government plan could cause me to lose the employer coverage I have today. More government bureaucracy will only create more problems, not solve the ones we have."

more...

http://www.businessinsider.com/health-insures-caught-paying-facebook-users-virtual-currency-to-send-letters-to-congress-opposing-reform-bill-2009-12

[gratuitous]

1. Isn't that nice?

And sure enough, over the weekend, there was some Republican waving a sheaf of e-mails and quoting the language of the Get Health Reform Right e-mail verbatim. Nothing said, naturally, about how all those e-mails said the exact same thing, or how they were obtained or generated. I'll have to do a little checking to find out the scumbag tool, but that shouldn't take too long once I get home.

[babylonsister]

2. I thought this was jaw-dropping. Maybe they've always gotten their

'support' this way since their platform isn't conducive to anything positive.

[gratuitous]

3. I suspect . . .

That when word of these shenanigans spreads through the gaming community, that someone, somewhere, might take the slightest bit of exception to having his name appropriated in such a manner. And it's just possible that this person will have some computer skillz, and the good folks behind Get Health Reform Right might just find that they are the object of an internet attack. And it would be oh-so-wrong if that were to happen. Nearly as wrong as what GHRR did in the first place. And two wrongs don't make a right. But it might be a rough approximation of justice.

[im1013]

4. Gamers would never do something like that.....

:popcorn:

[gratuitous]

5. Oh, never ever

I totally agree.