How do you get your grass so green??

Juan Guevara

jg808618@ohio.edu

Astroturfing… I have to admit, I am not surprised by this new practice. I was aware of the practice, however, I was not aware that it was such a large scale practice that it had a name. In summary, Astroturfing is the practice of companies, political interest, and anyone with an interest and or goal, to hire a group of people with the sole purpose of performing online activities, such as blogging, commenting, liking, arguing, anything which would promote a cause.

The problem with this is, they engage and support a cause, not because they are interested and believe in the purpose, but because they are being paid. So, for example, Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which highlights the current fate of the earth's climate. When it was released, a video on YouTube surfaced, mocking the film, it’s called Al Gore’s Penguin Army, it has over 600,000 views! The creator was supposedly a “Toutsmith” and made to believe it was created by a normal everyday citizen which did not buy into Al Gore’s cause, but, guess what, yup, a little company called Exxon was behind it.

The reason? Well, isn’t it obvious? It appears real, it appears organic, and that is so powerful. Think about it, you cannot clearly distinguish it is an ad and may process the information as genuine, swaying your opinion. When I see an ad, I immediately tune out, but how do you tune this out? You can’t. Not unless you tune out all social media messages and material except for actual friends and colleagues.

The depth of this goes so deep. Some of these profiles have multiple accounts, are active with posting, they post material which is irrelevant, all for the purpose of creating the illusion of a real person, real “turf.” Their material is no different than anyone else’s and when you look at it that way, their turf as real as anyone else’s; a terrifying thought. When I said I am not surprised I meant that with every technological advancement, usually, it comes with it’s set of problems.

What do we do? Well, I would hope that legislation catches up with this practice and either ban it (not sure how this can even be enforced) or label it as a paid advertisement. The other thing is we could all be a little more careful. The internet should always be treated as an uncharted field; an uncharted field full of landmines. Tread carefully.