In Europe there are 139 nuclear reactors. Reactor owners cooperate with each other to lobby the European institutions. One of the organisations in which they work together to lobby the EU is Foratom, the Forum for Atomic Energy.

Foratom uses its website (www.foratom.org) to promote the use of nuclear energy. Given this, and as members of Foratom have a financial interest in nuclear power, the website of Foratom can be considered an advertising medium. It should therefore comply with (Belgian) advertising regulation. A basic rule of advertising is that ads cannot lie (really!).

reference site: ec.europa.eu en.wikipedia.org es.wikipedia.org fr.wikipedia.org de.wikipedia.org foeeurope.org

Who's online?
On every page of the Foratom website the current number of guests online - and the total amount of visitors - are displayed. The website claims to have had over 3 million visitors, and to have, on average, more then 500 guests at any one time.

However, there is something fishy about these numbers; If they lie about the number of guests, would you ever trust them on issues like nuclear safety? they seem remarkably high. It makes no difference if you check the site in the middle of the night, on Sundays, early in the morning, or in the middle of the day; the number of guests is always roughly 500. It seems peculiar that a site about nuclear power in Europe always has around 500 guests online. In comparison, Friends of the Earth Europe has around 2000 visitors per day. And FoEE's website has information on many more issues besides nuclear power.

So a remarkably high and consistent number of 'guests online'. What could this mean? Well, the European Nuclear Forum is an advocacy organisation on a highly controversial topic. A visitor to their website might well glance at the high number of online guests, and register that apparantly a lot of people are consulting the information on the site of the forum.This could then cause them to think if it is so popular, their pro-nuclear information probably makes a lot of sense...

Cyberaction!
The Friends of the Earth anti-nuclear campaign believes that the number of guests online as displayed on the website of the forum is not correct. FoEE does not believe this is a mistake or error. That would be too much of a coincidence. In stead, Friends of the Earth believes that the Forum for Nuclear Energy purposely increases the number of visitors to its site to increase its credibility. It is literal spin.

FoEE has decided to further investigate the number of visitors to the Foratom website with a cyberaction, and this is where we need your help! Interactively expose the spin of the nuclear industry!

We invite people to visit the site of the forum, and to report the current amount of guests to FoEE. We will then track all these values in an hourly graph. If the number of visitors as claimed on the site of Foratom is showing a similar curve as that of any of the reference sites, probably, the number is real. However, if the average of the values reported by cyberactivists does not show the expectyed curve then the amount of guests reported by the forum is likely to be incorrect, and a fabrication by the forum.

If you want to participate in this cyberaction, you need to sign up. Once you have confirmed your registration, you can report 'guest' values from the nuclear forum, review values others have reported, and interact with other cyberactivists in the cybercentre. The values you and others provide are automatically processed to update the chart in this page. If the red line (average hourly values) turns into a flat line, it will be beyond doubt that the forum is providing false information.

Advertising complaint
If we collect enough convincing data, Friends of the Earth Europe will file a complaint with the Belgian advertising authorities. When you sign up, you can indicate if you want to be notified when we file the complaint, and when we get the verdict.

We need enough convincing data, probably covering several weeks, so please do come back and tell your anti-nuclear friends!

The February Wikipedia statistics used for comparison are taken from http://dammit.lt/wikistats/ The web team of the European Commission was so kind to provide the Commission website statistics for several days in February, 2008.