Creating deceptive grassroots campaigns to fabricate the appearance of widespread support or opposition.
01
WHY IT MATTERS
People often trust small, local, grassroots groups more than large, powerful, biased organizations, such as oil/petroleum companies, powerful lobbyist groups, tobacco and alcohol corporations, and major banks. People trust the smaller groups for many good reasons - the smaller organizations can get to know local communities, are not beholden to shareholders or profit margins, and can genuinely care about their messages.
02
DANGERS
Large, powerful groups producing manipulative media and creating false organizations misleads common people and reduces trust in real grassroots organizations while benefiting the already powerful larger organizations. Astroturfing can especially cause damage to environmental management, local governments, and small businesses.
03
REAL WORLD EXAMPLES
When you feel you are being watched, how do you alter your behavior? The Panopticon was designed as a prison in which a single guard could exert control over all prisoners with maximum efficiency. With the growth of AI surveillance and proliferation of public surveillance devices, we increasingly live within panopticons in public, at home, and online.
SAVE OUR TIPS:
Once claiming to represent service workers and their income, investigations revealed Save Our Tips was secretly a group opposing increases to minimum wage funded by restaurant owners.GLOBAL CLIMATE COALITION:
This organization posed as an independent coalition of concerned citizens and businesses, but fossil fuel and automotive corporations actually created it to question the scientific consensus on climate change.
LOBBYIST FIRM CAUGHT POSING AS THE NAACP:
Major lobbyist group Bonner & Associates fabricated letters to try to from the NAACP to try to derail The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. The NAACP said the firm was "exploiting the African-American Community to achieve their misdirected goal”.
WHERE TO LEARN MORE
Poisoning the Well: How Astroturfing Harms Trust in Advocacy Organizations
Social Currents, the official journal of the Southern Sociological Society, is a broad-ranging social science journal that focuses on cutting-edge research from all methodological and theoretical orientations with implications for national and international sociological communities. The uniqueness of Social Currents lies in its format. The front …
Exxon Mobil was behind a YouTube video spoofing Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth"
The release of Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" in 2006 was followed by outpourings of either support or criticism, depending on which side of the global warming theory one chose to take. One man apparently felt so strongly that Gore's view was wrong -- but more importantly, boring -- that he created a video on YouTube called "Al Gore's Penguin Army," spoofing the ideas set forth…
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