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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @07:25PM
The above average caliber people who come to this website from many different walks of life can spot obvious astroturfing and shilling and say "obvious astroturfer is obvious." At the very least, the critical thinkers here will follow a discussion, point for counterpoint, maybe some of us back in the peanut gallery will request citations every now and then, and sooner or later it at least becomes obvious which viewpoint being presented has the better debater. That viewpoint may not be the end-all-be-all of viewpoints, but we understand that. Perhaps somebody will come along and argue the other viewpoint more eloquently. If the viewpoint is rubbish, no person who's here for reasonable debate will bother salvaging it and there it will rot having been summarily tossed out of the arena of ideas. Hopefully you gather what I'm getting at.
The problem is that the hearts and minds to be won or lost on the real issues are the masses of sheep/cows who are Facebookers, Twits, change.org frequenters, all the people posting to your local newspaper's Disqus comments section, etc.
At least, that is a problem as long as a democratic republic is the best kind of government we know to work.
This AC doesn't have a better form of government to propose. In sci-fi, we often see an advanced expert system or post-singularity AI take the reigns of a technocratic government where everyone prospers. Yet, that seem to me to boil down to supposing we have a government made of incorruptible angels. I don't see how this is workable in the real world.
I've seen radical proposals such as allowing all people to choose which government they want to pay taxes to. Say I choose to join a minarchist libertarian government whose only form of social safety net is universal basic income and universal healthcare. (Seems we get a lot of immigrants each year from the anarchist "fuck you I've got mine" Randian bootstrapper paradise government lol.) I get to smoke weed after work. Yay. Say my neighbor is a member of a theocratic authoritarian government such as the one Cruz seems to want. Its people pay it taxes for a convoluted social safety net and dysfunctional criminal justice system, but hey, they're happy paying for-profit prisons to imprison infidels. (Another source of immigrants each year for my minarchist utopia lol.)
One day my neighbor gets pissed because I smoked a particularly pungent blunt after a stressful day and reports this to his police. Smoking weed is strictly forbidden under his government. How does that confrontation go down? Don't try to think of all the stupid details like wafting odors or somesuch. It could be anything. Maybe my neighbor notices that I often get kebaps at a local Muslim take-out place and tries to get his government to arrest me for doing business with Muslims or something. I don't see how it can work. (Yeah, he'd probably try first to get the kebap stand shut down but say that resulted in an armed standoff between my government and his already and an uneasy treaty to agree to disagree on the matter of whether Muslims can own and operate businesses.)