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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: 2) by gidds on Tuesday April 26 2016, @12:49PM
I can't help but agree with what seems (if you can see past the froth) the article's main point. Yes, misrepresentation is bad; and this sort of deliberate large-scale deceit to sway public opinion is bad, wrong, and should be criminal and punished severely.
However…
Isn't there also just a tiny amount of responsibility on us as readers? If we're going to accept absolutely everything we read, without the slightest consideration, questioning, or use of critical faculties, then we're going to be misled in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people, and some of that will be fully legal and maybe not even immoral.
For example, people naturally prefer to read news articles and other web pages whose opinions they agree with, rather that those they disagree with. In many cases, there's no need to set up echo-chambers and groupthink sites, as we're automatically biased to seek them out ourselves! (Perhaps you here less than most; but it's still a natural tendency.)
Reality is a very complex place, and our understanding of it is always going to be incomplete. We like to assume that the bits we do see will be representative, and that we can just extrapolate — but that's rarely the case, and it's easy to fool ourselves.
I think it would do us all good to try to be more aware of that, to realise that we don't know the full story and may be misleading ourselves, especially when it's from what other people say.
If we all did that — if we all engaged our critical reasoning a little more often, and didn't blindly accept all we see — then astroturfing would have less effect on us. And the author wouldn't need to get so rabidly worked up.
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