Know what an ‘astroturfer’ is? Media manipulators have been employing these for some time and in the West the tobacco and oil industries are among the special interest groups caught red-handed in the practice.
An astroturfer is an agent employed to post comment on the interweb as if they were a ‘grass-roots’ real-life person genuinely concerned with an issue. The fact that they are, in fact, for-hire provocateurs and so fake-grass-roots has earned them the term ‘astroturfers’.
Blake Miller, from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, wanted to take a fresh look at China to see if it was possible to detect the presence of government sponsored astroturfers at work there? Studies have been made in the past on the so-called Fifty Cent Party i.e. agents presumed to be paid 50-cents by the government (they’re not) per helpful post and have been inconclusive as to how the system works and its extent.
In the paper highlighted today the researcher has drilled 70m comments related to 6m news articles published at 19 domestic news sites using techniques which they claim can finger astroturfers with a 94% accuracy rate.
The bottom line is that around 15% of all online comment on news articles in the media tracked are government sponsored. As the work shows this isn’t the product of a vast conspiracy as the practice isn’t centrally controlled and is mobilized often to promote quite specific and very local issues.
But it is ubiquitous and clearly an established part of the state-governance apparatus, which makes it icky/worrisome/evil or sad depending on your particular viewpoint.
It’s also a clear sign the government of China operates nervously and without confidence in the legitimacy that most Western governments enjoy (despite the nincompoops they vote in as their so-called leaders!).
The paper is well written and very approachable and you can find the full text via the following link China’s Astroturfers.
Happy Sunday.