The Power of Astroturfing

By: Anthony Suszczynski

as309714@ohio.edu

Astroturfing was a term I had not heard of until this week. Astroturfing takes place when groups posing as grassroots organizations create media including websites and social media to further their cause. One such example of this is in the lecture. Americans Against Food Taxesappears to be an innocent organization with a righteous cause – the cause being against government taxes of certain foods. 

The lecture explains that this group was actually created by the beverage and food industry trade groups because they were upset with the taxes on pops and juices due to the high sugar content.

So why is this problematic? Who cares who makes the group if it’s for a good cause? It is problematic because they are deceiving the public. There is an extreme lack of transparency. The average person most likely thinks that Americans Against Food Taxesis a group unattached to the big food industries and trade groups. Another example from the lecture is Working Families for Walmart. This group appears to be organized by citizens because they want Walmart in their community, but is actually organized by Walmart because they want Walmart in the community. So the problem is that these groups are acting unethically and the causes are not necessarily meant to help the public, but instead they are meant to help further the group’s agenda. 

In a clip of “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver he sums up astroturfing well by saying, “When you add all of this together, fake groups hiring fake experts and fake crowds which manage to affect real world change, it gets pretty dispiriting and it can do real damage. It goes way beyond the narrow issues that each group is trying to influence.” I believe Oliver’s summary of the impact of astroturfing is nicely said. He mentioned the word “fake” three times in his summarization and I found an article by USA Today which deals with fake support. 

The USA Today article is titled, “Why you should be skeptical of 2020 candidates: ‘Astroturfing’ can distort public opinion.” On April 14, 2019 USA Today asked a question to their readers. The question was, “Which 2020 candidate is standing out to you and why?” The number one response was in support of a person named Andrew Yang. According to the article, “hundreds of emails supporting Yang came flooding in.” That is particularly interesting because the odds are that most reading this have never heard of Yang. The article states that he is, “polling in low single digits nationally.”

So why is this so much email support? The reason, as the article explains, is because of astroturfing. Just like the Americans Against Food Taxes andWorking Families for Walmartexamples from earlier, a group in support of Andrew Yang wants to change the public perception in an effort to further their cause – electing Yang to the presidency. So the small group most likely coordinated an effort to fire off a good load of emails to USA Today in support of Andrew Yang thus distorting the level of support he has nationally. 

Lastly, an example of astroturfing that has an unnerving feel to it is within a government. An article by CNN titled, “Researcher: China pays 280K people to boost its Web image” explains that China employs people to make the public image of the government look good. These people use message boards, comment sections, social networking, and blogs to promote the views of the Chinese government. So as you can see astroturfing can obviously be quite deceiving and can be used within food industries, interest groups, corporations, elections, and even governments. 

 

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