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What is Astroturfing?

MediaTricks | February 13, 2022

WHAT IS ASTROTURFING?

A carefully constructed narrative by unseen special interests, designed to manipulate your opinion. A Truman Show-esque alternate reality all around you.

Complacency in the news media combined with incredibly powerful propaganda and publicity forces mean we sometimes get little of the truth. Special interests have unlimited time and money to figure out new ways to spin us while cloaking their role.

Astroturf is when special interests disguise themselves, and publish blogs, Create Facebook or Twitter accounts, publish ads, letters to the editor, or simply post comments online to try to fool you into thinking an independent grassroots movement is speaking.

The Whole point Of Astroturf is to try to give the impression that there's widespread support for or against an agenda, When there's not.

Astroturf seeks to manipulate you and change your opinion, by making you feel like you're an outlier when you're not.

Astroturfers seek to controversialize those Who disagree With them. They attack news organizations that publish stories they don't like, whistleblowers who tell the truth, politicians who dare to ask the tough questions, and journalists that have the audacity to report on all of it.
Sometimes astroturfers simply shove, intentionally, so much confusing and conflicting information into the mix that you're left to throw up your hands and disregard all Of it, including the truth.

Hallmarks Of astroturfing include use Of inflammatory language, such as "crank", "quack", "nutty", "lies", "paranoid" or "conspiracy'.

Astroturfers often claim to "debunk" myths that are not myths at all. Beware when interests attack an issue by controversializing Or attacking the people, personalities and organizations surrounding rather than addressing the facts. Most of all, astroturfers tend to reserve all of their public skepticism for those exposing wrongdoing rather than for the wrongdoers. Become a wiser consumer of information in an increasingly artificial, paid-for reality.

And then there's Wikipedia, astroturf's dream come true.

Built as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" the reality can't be more different. Anonymous Wikipedia editors control and co-opt pages on behalf of special interests. They forbid and reverse edits that go against their agenda. They skew and delete information, in blatant Violation of Wikipedia's own established policies — with impunity, always superior to the poor smucks who actually believe "anyone can edit" Wikipedia, only to discover they're barred from correcting even the simplest factual inaccuracy.

All of this may be why when a medical study looked at medical conditions described in Wikipedia pages and compared it to actual peer-reviewed published research, Wikipedia contradicted medical research 90% of the time. You may never fully trust what you read on Wikipedia again, nor should you.

- Sharyl Attkisson Investigative journalist

Categories: Fake Grassroots, Influencers, Propaganda, Psychological, Social Media, Wikipedia Tags: astroturfing, coordination, online manipulation, Sharyl Attkisson, Wikipedia

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