Waxy.org has done some detective work and found that Sitelynx is spamming social networks on behalf of The Times to help boost their search engine rankings. It seems pretty conclusive after reading the post. No comment as yet from the Times or Sitelynx.
Some people have commented that if they had just said they were The Times in the first place then all would be fine. I’m not so sure thats true. People have a habit of lambasting people/companies who try and promote themselves like this, but it is definitely better to be open about it rather then subversive. The New York Times seems to have done a good job of this by using sites like Techmeme to promote themselves openly.
At the end of the day, if your self promotion is helpful to the community site then more people will interact with it and the community wins overall. This has certainly been the case with Techmeme and The NY Times.