Mow Down Astroturfing Influence

Just after receiving an avalanche of messages urging him to support legislation favoring insurance companies, U.S. Senator Lloyd Benson declared, “A fellow from Texas can tell the difference between grass roots and AstroTurf.” And as that happened was born the term “astroturfing” to refer to artificially generated messages designed to portray widespread public support for an opinion favored by the astroturfing sponsor. While grassroots campaigns are bottom-up, astroturfing is top-down. The deception is not necessarily in the content of the messages. They might be multiplying the voice of what people are really thinking. The deception is in claiming the messages were created by a range of members of the public.
     Between 2016 and 2018, Twitter identified 10 million tweets generated by 4,500 accounts which were probably phony. More than 84% of those accounts are believed to be affiliated with the St. Petersburgh Internet Research Agency, a top source of fake messages worldwide. Astroturfing is now more prevalent in online postings intended to influence voters than in messages designed to directly influence politicians. This makes it not only more prevalent, but also more pernicious, conclude researchers at University of Zurich and University of Passau. When the messages do not genuinely reflect the public’s consensus, online astroturfing progressively eats away at the electorate’s understanding of truth.
     The researchers explored ways to head off this decay. The most effective way they found was to inoculate citizens with warnings about the specific arguments likely to be used by astroturfers and then explanations of why those arguments are flawed. Like an inoculation against disease, this intervention needs to happen in advance, and that requires you to spot campaigns early.
     This technique also requires you to continually deliver booster shots of warnings and refutations. In the studies, the protection of an initial inoculation against astroturfing’s damage faded after about two weeks.
     The AstroTurf grass substitute doesn’t need periodic fertilizing or mowing. To combat distortions of reality, astroturfing does necessitate the parallels of that maintenance. The deep roots of astroturfing in history show how it keeps popping up. The declaration by Lloyd Benson, the senator representing Texas, about being able to distinguish genuine from fabricated expressions of opinion was made in 1985. Not far back enough to convince you of my point? Okay, recall that Shakespeare wrote in “Julius Caesar” of how Cassius created fake letters from the public in order to persuade Brutus to carry out the assassination.

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