Wait, Who Said That?

 Tony Zimmerman

tz996419@ohio.edu

Grassroots, ground-up organizing is the most effective way to motivate and fire up people about an issue. In political campaigns, it is well understood that the most effective messenger to potential voters is their friends or family. Having a friend share and advocate for the campaign's positions leads to people being far more receptive to the information. Why is this? It’s because people trust people they know and are less trusting of big corporations and campaigns. The only thing is that wealthy donors who fund campaigns are aware of this too. 

Their solution to getting around the general public not trusting them is simple. Change the messenger to "local advocates." This is precisely what the Koch family did in Virginia when they found some local parents who were upset about the COVID policies of their local school. They could take a natural movement, amplify it, and fund it far beyond what it actually was. Why did they do this? To push the agenda, they have been driving and advocating since the 1960s, defunding public education and promoting privately funded education. How does this type of astroturfing work? It isn’t all done with bots, as one might assume, but rather by real people employed to create multiple fake profiles. All of these profiles are then pushing the same narrative making it appear as though it is a widely and deeply held position. 

Source: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

It takes a lot of money to employ real people to perform these actions but setting up a website with fake or inflammatory news stories isn’t complicated or expensive as one researcher found. It not only wasn’t tricky, but it was profitable to do. The researcher received an ad revenue check shortly after creating it. So, not only is political astroturfing a way to set a narrative around an issue, but it is also a potentially very lucrative practice. This helps us see why it is so dangerous. 

A silver lining is that if a group is outed as being funded by millionaires or billionaires, it can lose credibility with the people it’s trying to sway. People do not like being tricked into doing something or taking a position on something. People are willing to listen to someone if they are upfront and transparent about their connections to an issue but far less forgiving when they are purposefully misled about a person’s ties to a subject.