Tobias Escher at the OII

One would probably agree to the statement that the US government feels a certain need to promote its views on the war in Iraq in whatever way possible. One tends to think that should be easier with traditional media where governments have traditionally relied on a variety of tools in order to keep itself some influence over the message. On the Internet, however, where everybody can raise his or her voice to a potentially huge audience, we tend to think governments struggle to set the agenda of discussion and keep an influence on public opinion. And indeed, if for example you do a Google search on “war in iraq” you get a lot of results but in the top twenty (and what else matters) there are no government sources at all and the most results are either rather neutral or outright against the US strategy on Iraq.

However, as always the US government is ready to put some money to a “good cause” and found a rather imaginative solution to this problem: buying adlinks on Google. Try yourself or have a look at the screenshot, one of the adlinks for a “war in iraq” search points to “The official site of the Multi-National Force – Iraq” with loads of good news from the troops on the ground.

I am not sure what surprises me more: the very fact that the US government is actually spending money on Google adlinks at all or that they actually managed to figure out that there is a potential problem and addressed it rather smartly…