Astroturfing: when misinformation meets activism

You have certainly heard the phrases “fake news” and “you are being manipulated on the internet” lately talking to your friends and colleagues. The issue of “misinformation” has become the scene of academic debate and even speeches by political authorities. It is already commonplace to receive or give the advice of “don’t believe everything you read or send to you on social networks”.

Generally, we think this kind of advice is valid for news and events, but we also need to pay attention to the opinions spread out there. Do you know when, in the middle of an episode of a soap opera or music video, the central character shows a branded item and speaks well of it, but without clarifying that it is getting money for it? This type of practice has a larger dimension when, besides selling an item directly, public policies are directed around a specific private interest, keeping the beneficiary hidden.

To promote or frustrate support for some agenda, corporations or entities try to mimic a natural movement of convergence of opinions by sponsoring manifestations of individuals or groups around the subject. The problem with this is that it seems that these people are acting on their own, without being clear that there are other interests (and money) behind that cause. How does this happen? Imagine you are in the year 1909, and you are beginning to come across several publications called The Cup-Campaigner. They warn, quite sensationally, of the spread of disease through the shared use of metal cups (common in public drinking fountains in the US at the time), something like this:

The solution offered is to ban these items and use disposable cups. Soon, many people join the campaign and begin to press the authorities for measures in this direction. The government is responding to this public health campaign and is encouraging the use of disposable cups. Sounds like a story of public policy mobilization with a happy ending, right? But what if, much later, you learned that the publisher of these pamphlets was Hugh Moore, co-founder of the Public Cup Vendor Company, which later became the Dixie Cup Company, which sold disposable cups? This was a famous episode of the phenomenon that I intend to discuss today and which integrates the great puzzle of misinformation on the internet.

Synthetic Grassroots Movements

This practice of simulating movement around a particular agenda by making it appear spontaneous and originating in society, hiding the bond with corporations or centralizing agents, is called astroturfing. The term comes from a synthetic lawn brand – “AstroTurf” – and has to do with the idea of grassroots movement, with its various converging roots, which is imitated by the synthetic, having the same apparent qualities although it is artificial.

But why are we talking about this, since it’s such an old problem? Because the technologies we have at hand have done something revolutionary for these advertising engines: they have become more dimmer and cheaper than ever. In the past, astroturfing was considered an expensive and not so simple way to do public relations. And if it was hard to identify, it has now been enhanced with the use of fake agency-controlled profiles and automated messaging bots.

Many people may perceive a subtext in soap operas, movies, major channels of communication, referred to as “biased”. However, this is rarely thought of when a group member of whatsapp, an “average user” of social networks, posts an opinion. And if this opinion begins to appear elsewhere, apparently dissociated from each other, it can easily become an agenda, gaign sympathizers, and become a cause around which society really mobilizes.

No more paying to spread flyers and leaflets without highlighting the publisher/sponsor. It is simpler to hire whole teams of people who are paid a modest or even negligible amount to spread messages to their peers in groups and contacts on social networks. And it’s much harder to identify where a message came from or whether the user who passed it on was acting out of genuine interest or was simply co-opted for other reasons to spread it. The fact is that, like with the synthetic turf, these artificial staves are often more resilient and effective than real staves.

We have the solution; but was that even the problem?

“Fake it ‘till you make it” becomes the phrase of the hour in the context of online astroturfing. It is possible to make an agenda hidden behind corporate interests become genuinely in the interest of civil society organizations. Users mobilized by artificial movements come to support, without any hidden intention, a cause that has often not so transparent consequences.

One of the great factors of astroturfing is to make the solution pointed out by the stakeholders attractive by emphasizing the problem it solves. Often the problem or solution is not really connected, and the link between them masks real issues that should be addressed. This has occurred in some known and studied cases beyond the iconic case of the public glass. As reported in this paper, there was a booming mining company in India facing problems with local environmental communities. She then sponsored the spread of traditions and culture of those tribes, co-opting the leadership of the resistance movement to become an advocate of industrialization. In this process, the environmental agenda was marginalized, as the focus shifted to the tribes’ demand for development opportunities from the authorities.

These episodes of opacity about the agenda behind public policy reveal that misinformation can also be countered with more transparency by the authorities. After all, if there are private interests sponsoring public opinion mobilizers, and public opinion pressures the authorities to adopt a solution that may favor a private agent, that should be clear to people, and questionable. If it is not feasible to identify whenever an opinion is secretly sponsored, it is at least possible to monitor what is done from its position on the public policy agenda.

We need to rethink our relationship to misinformation, going beyond fact-checking and finding safe sources for our own opinion formation. Public decision-making needs to be guided, more than any other, not only by immediate demands and mobilizations, but by secure, research-based sources, facts investigated and tested by entities from different perspectives. Social mobilization is a powerful tool for prioritizing the government, and is therefore equally valuable when it comes to requiring transparency to evaluate the solutions adopted.

If misinformation is a matter of interest to you, read this other post and find out what is our legislature’s approach to the problem!

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors.
Illustration by Freepik