Corporate-Funded Online Astroturfing

Every month there is more evidence that online comments and forums are being hijacked by people who aren't what they seem to be. The anonymity of the web gives companies and governments golden opportunities to run "astroturf" operations: fake grassroots campaigns which create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies. This deception is most likely to occur where the interests of companies or governments come into conflict with the interests of the public. For example, there's a long history of tobacco companies creating astroturf groups to fight attempts to regulate them.

After I last wrote about online astroturfing, I was contacted by a whistleblower who was part of a commercial team employed to infest Internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients, promoting their causes and arguing with anyone who opposed them. Like the other members of the team, he posed as a disinterested member of the public. Or, to be more accurate, as a crowd of disinterested members of the public. He used 70 personas, both to avoid detection and to create the impression that there was widespread support for his pro-corporate arguments. It now seems that these operations are more widespread, sophisticated, and automated than most of us had guessed. Emails obtained by political hackers from a U.S. cyber-security firm called HB Gary Federal suggest that technological weaponry is being used to drown out the voices of real people.

As the Daily Kos has reported, the emails show that:

Ø Companies now use "persona management software," which multiplies the efforts of the astroturfers working for them, creating the impression that there's major support for what a corporation or government is trying to do. This software automatically generates what look like authentic profiles, making it hard to tell the difference between a virtual robot and a real commentator.

Ø Fake accounts can be updated by automatically re-posting or linking to content generated elsewhere, reinforcing the impression that the account holders are real and active.

Ø Human astroturfers are assigned "pre-aged" accounts to create a back story, suggesting that they've been busy linking and re-tweeting for months. No one would suspect that they came on to the scene for the first time a moment ago, for the sole purpose of attacking an article on climate science or arguing against new controls on salt in junk food.

Ø With some clever use of social media, astroturfers can, in the security firm's words, "make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise…. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas."

But perhaps the most disturbing revelation is that the U.S. Air Force has been tendering for companies to supply it with persona management software, which will:

a)  create "10 personas per user, replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent.… Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online and social media platforms"

b)  automatically provide its astroturfers with "randomly selected IP addresses" (the number that identifies someone's computer) through which they can access the Internet, "hiding the existence of the operation," and mixing up astroturfers' web traffic with "traffic from multitudes of users from outside the organization, providing excellent cover and powerful deniability"

c)  create "static IP addresses" for each persona, enabling different astroturfers "to look like the same person over time, which should also allow organizations that frequent same site/service often to easily switch IP addresses to look like ordinary users as opposed to one organization."

Software like this has the potential to severely damage the Internet as a forum for constructive debate. It makes a mockery of online democracy. Comment threads on issues with major commercial implications are already being wrecked by what look like armies of organized trolls. The Internet is a wonderful gift, but it's also a bonanza for corporate lobbyists, viral marketers, and government spin doctors who can operate in cyberspace without regulation, accountability, or fear of detection. The question that has yet to be satisfactorily answered is: what should we do to fight

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George Monbiot is the author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. This article originally appeared in the Guardian.