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Current Affairs published an in-depth editorial on recent revelations about a $1 million astroturfng campaign by Correct the Record:
Astroturfing makes me angry. It should make you angry. It should make you fucking well see red. It's marketing evolved into something incredibly scary, sophisticated, and evil. It's essentially thought warfare, or psychological warfare, which takes away much of what was supposed to make the internet a new and beautiful frontier of communication. Worse yet, if you actually identify and approach these operatives, they'll gaslight you and deny that they are such an operative. These are people who are paid to psychologically abuse you. Do you get this? It's an ugly and evil thing, and not only does it take away our ability to take information and fact at face value, but it takes away our ability to take opinions, feelings, and personal stances at face value as sincere and legitimate.
takyon: For some additional context, "Hillary-supporting super PAC invests $1 million to hit back at online Clinton critics":
Correct the Record, a super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton's bid to become US president, has promised to invest more than $1 million to respond to users criticizing its candidate on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, and other social media services. The super PAC says its new "Barrier Breakers digital task force" will to respond "quickly and forcefully to negative attacks and false narratives found online," in addition to thanking major supporters and "committed superdelegates" directly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday April 26 2016, @11:58AM
I recall that corporate shills/trolls were generally eviscerated on Slashdot. By the time astroturfing became a tactic, the community had already matured and had developed antibodies for it. I suppose I'd credit karma with that. When you have long-time users posting under consistent handles, they establish that they're real. Karma accruing to that username restrains, for the most part, acid replies.
Slashdot really only started to fall apart because the site's owners chose to sabotage it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday April 26 2016, @12:56PM
What about low noise level spam? The weekly slashvertisement about e-ink? Personally I found that incredibly annoying.
The dangerous or effective astroturfing isn't the "stand up to the man in a single heroic Ayn Rand style 75 page long prepared speech" but more like TV detergent commercials who are perfectly happy to tell you 15000 times to buy Tide as long as the 15001-th time you hear it, you finally buy Tide. Its a major hit to standard of living that we all have to sit thru that crap 15000 times because one idiot buckled on the 15001-th time.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:59PM
Really? You managed to forget Cold fjord?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 26 2016, @06:04PM
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday April 26 2016, @08:23PM