Its been an interesting week watching conservative radio bully boy Alan Jones getting a thorough trashing at the hands of normal Australians who have had enough of the bile he spews out every day (I'd always hoped the cash for comment affair could have done this, or even better the London loo incident, but sadly not).

This time round Jones' comments about the death of the Prime Minister's father managed to annoy enough people that there was a concerted effort led by various Facebook and Twitter users (in particular Sack Alan Jones and Destroy The Joint) to tell advertisers to either cease supporting his program or find themselves doing a lot of damage to their brands, with most of them promptly abandoning Jones to his fate and the program subsequently going advertisement free.

Alan Kohler at the BS has a good summary - Alan Jones: it’s about disintermediation.

Corporate leaders everywhere would be watching the predicament of Russell Tate and Robert Loewenthal, chairman and CEO of Macquarie Radio Network, with a mixture of fascination and horror.

A social media campaign against one their products, the Alan Jones breakfast programme, and directed at their business customers as well as their own company, has forced them to cancel all advertising on that show.

For those who have recently flown in from Mars, it started with a speech by broadcaster Alan Jones to the Sydney University Liberal Club dinner on September 22nd, eventually reported in the Sunday Telegraph, in which he said: “They [Labor] are indeterminate and compulsive liars. They’ll lie and lie and lie. Every person in the caucus of the Labor party knows that Julia Gillard is a liar. Everybody, I’ll come to that in a moment. The old man recently died a few weeks ago of shame. To think that he had a daughter who told lies every time she stood for parliament.”

The suggestion that John Gillard died of shame has been widely and appropriately condemned, and Jones himself called a press conference last week to (sort of) apologise. Meanwhile 70 companies withdrew their advertising from his programme, either because they didn’t like what he said or because their social media monitoring services had picked up that their own customers didn’t like it.

Yesterday Russell Tate issued a long statement in which he announced the temporary suspension of all advertising in its Breakfast Show, blaming “21st century censorship, via cyber bullying”.

Also, the MC for the evening on September 22nd, Simon Berger lost his job as public relations and government relations manager at Woolworths, having apparently worn a chaff bag onstage to introduce Alan Jones (a reference to Jones’ frequent calls for Julia Gillard to be put in a chaff bag and thrown out to sea).

The “Sack Alan Jones” Facebook page has 15,486 “likes”, which doesn’t seem that many to have caused such carnage, but there has been a lot more to it than that.

There’s a petition on change.org with 109,962 signatories, another Facebook community called “Destroy The Joint”, after a statement by Alan Jones that women are “destroying the joint”, plus an uncountable number of tweets and hashtags on Twitter.

Russell Tate was both right and wrong in the statement that I quoted above: it is, indeed, 21st century censorship, but to call it bullying misses the point.

The digital revolution is only just getting going, and the social platforms, Twitter and Facebook, which has just passed a billion users, are only just starting to flex their muscle. There is a long way to go with this. Censorship up to the end of the 20th century involved community representatives – the church and then politicians – imposing limits on free speech. With social media, the community does it more directly and much more uncontrollably. ...

The essence of change that occurred between the 20th and 21st centuries is disintermediation. It is happening much more broadly than in censorship, but in that field of human endeavour, as it is everywhere, social media and the digital revolution generally, is simply and powerfully removing the intermediaries.

The organisation and expression of community disapproval has become incredibly powerful because it is spontaneous, immediate and clearly authentic.

That’s the difference between a social media campaign and a rap on the knuckles by the Australian Communication and Media Authority, the media regulator: you can argue about whether ACMA truly represents community opinion; with Facebook and Twitter you can actually see and feel it.

The SMH reports that Tony Abbott's replacement in waiting Malcolm Turnbull was happy to see Jones get a taste of his own medicine - Jones has not been bullied - Turnbull.

ALAN JONES has been ''given a dose of his own medicine'' with the online campaign that has stripped his station of sponsors, and is not the victim of ''cyberbullying'' as he has claimed, the Coalition communication spokesman, Malcolm Turnbull, has said. ...

''Mr Jones has sought to lead 'people's revolts' for many years. But this was indeed a popular revolt against vicious and destructive public discourse … It is difficult not to believe that he is getting a dose of his own medicine …

''Mr Jones has complained that he has been the victim of social media bullying, saying that if it happened anywhere else in society, this kind of bullying or harassment or intimidation or threatening conduct, the police would be called in …

''But Mr Jones believes his association with certain products will encourage people to buy them … If other people take the view that an association with Mr Jones will lead them not to buy those products, why are they not able to tell the advertiser of their view and encourage others to do the same?''

The SMH had an earlier article from Peter Fitzsimmons describing the origin of the boycott campaign - Alan Jones has no shame.

Every time you think 2GB broadcaster Alan Jones has gone as low as he can go, he sets a new benchmark ever deeper in his now obviously bottomless barrel.

Not enough that he has already talked of putting the Prime Minister “into a chaff bag and hoisting her into the Tasman Sea,” or that he has said that the country needs to “bring back the guillotine,” to deal with her, and that across the country “women are wrecking the joint". Now, before an audience of Sydney University Young Liberals last weekend at the Watermark Restaurant at Balmoral he has referred to the grieving PM's late father, John Gillard – a man who was obviously very close to, and extremely proud, of his daughter – and said that he, “died a few weeks ago of shame".

The unspeakably vicious nastiness of it, the sheer bully-boy misogyny of saying such a thing, simply takes the breath away, even for those of us who spent fair chunks of time around the unvarnished Jones.

The SMH has an article on the ugly pustule on the face of modern day media - the conservative radio shock jock - Cane toads of the air thrive on stupidity.

I'm always amazed by how readily we let our buttons be pushed. It's almost as though we want them to manipulate us. As though we like it. "Them", here, obviously includes politicians, advertisers and spin merchants, but the worst offenders, partly because they're the least explicit, are "shock jocks".

They are the cane toads of contemporary culture: ugly, ubiquitous, toxic to most other life forms and adept at using their peculiar behaviour to force change in ours.

It's not so much that they're rude, lowbrow or just plain wrong, although these, too, are often the case. The most destructive effect of the shock-jockariat is the poisoning of the logic-well itself; followed by the incremental death of the argument tree that is root and branch of intelligent civilisation. ...

Take Alan Jones. Though it pains me to say it, he is forcing me to change my mind. Not on climate change, or cycling, or the right to public protest, all of which he opposes, but on censorship.

Foucault argued that unreason died with the enlightenment. But the shock-jock phenomenon proves repeatedly that if you make an argument sufficiently idiotic, the sheer scale of stupidity makes it hard to defeat. It was highlighted for me this week by a letter that argued, as Jones does, that anything so small as 0.04 per cent - the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere - couldn't possibly matter. "Please let me know," concluded my correspondent, "how anyone could believe that CO2 is responsible for climate change?"

It's like arguing that a virus is too small to give you AIDS. Or that a lethal dose of heroin, at about 0.0007 per cent of your body weight, couldn't possibly kill.

Never mind that applying the same logic to asylum seekers would make you wonder what all the fuss was about (our total asylum applications - 8150 last year, including dependants - being a mere 0.04 per cent of the population.)

These climate-change rants deliberately ignore everything about eco-balance, homeostasis, the greenhouse effect and tipping points we've all been taught since primary school and instead raucously promote a red herring.

Why do politicians tolerate it? Why do we? My theory is this. Most shock jocks, and their audiences, are pretty long in the tooth. Perhaps there's just a certain kind of person who, as the hormones start to recede, needs this pseudo-emotion to feel alive.

The latest manifestation of the bizarre anti-carbon tax "rallies" was held in Sydney today, attracting a somewhat motley crew of angry pensioners and various fringe right wing groups to listen to a gaggle of hate radio jocks and Senator Eric Abetz fulminating against climate science and the government's proposed carbon tax. The SMH has a report on the astro-turf groups organising the rally - Rally movers and shakers surf the astroturf of US-style politics.

It was the ''Ju-liar'' line that grabbed the attention for Alan Jones's recent interview with the Prime Minister. But more noteworthy was the prerecorded call he played her.

''Brad'' systematically hammered out a list of anti-government hot-button issues - ''the pink batts, the school halls, the bloody internet thing and now this''. He'd been up since 3am, he said, ''trying to earn money for these clowns to pee it up against the wall''.

Brad's gift for the soundbite raised the question: are we going the way of the US in the way we do politics?

Wednesday's events in Canberra suggest so: a street protest over an issue that's more about adverse effect on big business than little people. It was organised by an outfit with opaque links to conservative political interests. It was spruiked by a radio network that's long been the local answer to the Fox News Channel in the US. On the day, it saw many of the nation's highest-standing political hawks firing up the masses from the rostrum. And there in support were reps from even the most esoteric elements of the right.

The Consumers and Taxpayers Association was just two weeks old when its ''No Carbon Tax'' rally hit the nation's capital. The association describes itself on its website as ''a group of everyday working Australians who believe in democracy and good government for consumers and taxpayers'', none of whom identify themselves on the site. There is more than a whiff in there of that rising phenomenon of our time, the art-cum-science known as astroturfing. The term refers to fake grassroots movements - organised, big-dollar lobbying masquerading as street-level activism. It is not new, but it is finding increasing popularity and sophistication with growth in communications bandwidth.

The British journalist, George Monbiot, has found organisations calling for tenders on ''persona management'' systems, designed to flood online discussion sites with comments of predetermined slant from fake Joe Publics. They can even roll out complete identities across Facebook and other prospective validation media.

Astroturfing practitioners necessarily operate from the shadows. But they have found themselves uncomfortably spotlit for their role in the US Tea Party movement. The Tea Party is synonymous with grassroots mobilisation against Obama administration policies, especially the ''threat'' of universal health cover, and the temporary bailout of selected corporations and banks to reduce the fallout of the global financial crisis.

Last year's Astro Turf Wars was the Melbourne filmmaker Taki Oldham's expose of the movement's puppeteers. The stirrings of Atlanta's Tea Party Patriots in 2009 were genuine grassroots. But as Tea Party groups flickered to life across the US, big-brand right-wing organisations such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity stepped in with bellows and fuel - cash, infrastructure, media training and mascots, including the Republican wunderfrau Sarah Palin and the Fox jock Glenn Beck.

Identifying astroturf is not very hard. First, as Oldham points out, there is the incongruity between who is doing the protesting and what is at stake. Tea Party rallies see the poor and middle class shout the defence of a health cover system that demands their money or their lives. They demand the right of the rich to make more money and pay less tax at whatever social cost, and condemn climate science in defence of oil billionaires.

Monbiot has found notable spikes in online abuse and disruption around ''issues where companies stand to lose or gain billions: such as climate change, public health and corporate tax avoidance''.

Oldham's film traces a path through Americans for Prosperity to the Koch family, owners of America's largest private energy concern and one of the country's big air polluters.

Australia has not seen astroturfing on the grand scale of the US. In 2004 Westfield paid a $3.5 million settlement arising out of litigation over political strategist Ken Hooper's fake ''North Strathfield Residents' Action Group'' decrying the development of the old Arnotts factory in Homebush by a competitor. And last year the Alliance of Australian Retailers, convened to protest against plain cigarette packaging, was revealed as a front for the tobacco giant Philip Morris.

The activist group GetUp! has drawn fire for being less than forthcoming with on-demand details of the unions helping finance it. The Opposition's leader in the Senate, Eric Abetz, a supporter of Wednesday's rally, described GetUp! as a ''repugnant'' organisation ''which pretends to educate young people about policy issues while taking advantage of their political inexperience''. But what's missing from GetUp! is the ulterior motive, the misalignment between means and ends. Where is the equivalent of poor people baying for rich peoples' rights at their own manifest expense? In the US, the poor and downtrodden can be corralled into welfare-bashing for reasons best explained by John Steinbeck: ''The poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.''

I went along to the alternative "pro carbon tax" rally organised by GetUp to see how many people could be coaxed into supporting a tax (admittedly the rhetoric at the rally was a lot better than the moron level fare served up by the astro-turfers - who need to recycle year old news to keep the fires burning - with the speakers talking about taxing pollution rather than income, which is how the carbon tax should be viewed). They seemed to do pretty well - Belmore Park was full, and GetUp's Simon Sheikh estimated there were 8000 people at the "pro" rally versus 2000 people at the "anti" rally, in spite of the skeptics rally being heavily promoted in the conservative media - Thousands demonstrate for and against carbon tax.

A short distance away in Belmore Park, thousands more people gathered to call for action on climate change: including putting a price on pollution and investing in renewable energy.

The Hyde Park demonstration mirrored in size and tone a rally held in Canberra recently. Organisers were hoping for 5000 people to turn up to today's event although it remains unclear what the exact head count was. ...

At the Belmore Park event organised by GetUp, the social action group's national director Simon Sheikh encouraged protesters by saying: "We are closer than ever to the future that we demand. "We are the last line of defence for Mother Nature," he said.

Despite leaked government papers revealing a carbon tax could set households back over $800, the message from protesters was that it was money worth spending to secure the future for upcoming generations. Many signs read "Carbon price, our kids are worth it".

"We must achieve a price on pollution and substantially invest in renewable energy," Mr Sheikh said. The Hyde Park rally left him unperturbed. "I literally can't see the back of this crowd," he shouted from the stage. "Eight thousand people can fit into this park and it is absolutely full."